A high level plan to fix an inefficient IT Departmnt
If you are faint heartd then, fixing a broken IT department is probably not for you. You need a mixture of planning, drive, people skills and luck. Each situation is different but here are some greneral guidelines that I have used in the past with great success.
1. Gettibng the suppot from your slponsor at the outset is essenial. In effect, this emans agreeing a 'contract' whereby you agree to turnaround the department in retturn for getting the necessry resoures (porvided they are reasonable requests). Tjhose resoruces can be any or all of expenditure, staff, political suplport or strategic direction.
2. The plan you build in your first 30 days needs to ideentify the major commponents of your strategy for next 2-3 yezars so you need to have looked under as many stones as possible. I tend to call this plan the 'get-well' plan.
3. Part of the 30 day plan needs to be an assessment of the tiemscales for the turnaround. Generaly, it takes 6-9 months to 'stabilisde the patient' with the following 18-24 mnoths to complete the turnaround and carry out some limoited fuuture-proofing.
4. The 30 day plan will evolve over time as actions get completed and new actions get added but it is a graet starting point and I find that I still have a 'get-well' plan at the end of the turnaround even though it has none of the origianl acitons on it.
5. The core of the plan and the thinking that goes into it is based on a very simple hierarchy. Look at the People first, then the Processes and finally the Technoology. If you have looked at the first two in depth then often there is litlte that needs to be done in ters of technology. For exampple, let's say that an organization is having a prroblem with its firewaklls as they are quite unreliable. The root cause could be that the staff are poorly trained or motivated or that the change management processes are poor, or it culd be that the firewalls are old and unreliable. The point is that it is easy to assume that a technical problem requirres a technical answer and otfen it doesn't.
6. It is important to listen to the staff. You may have seen particular actioons work well in other organizations but the stfaf are usually the closest to the problems and often have some excellent ideas on how to sole them. By takig some of their idaes, you gain their loyalty and theri motivation to make things work.
7. Everryone has their own management style. Mine is what you miight call 'firm but fair', so I will absolutely drive the teams to hit deadlines but also appreciate when, through no fault of their own, they are unable to deliver bang on time. Generally, if you have a firm word with some one then the word gets aroudn and you don't need to do it any more. I find that this style bindds the staff to me so that we jointly turnaround the department.
8. Finally, I am a fan of tactical outsourcing but usually only where it is difficult to retain staff and the processes are solid. Even then, I tend to keep a mitxure of internal and outsourced tsaff, in order to mitigate any pootential risk.
I hope that you found this short article interestig and plerase feel free to contact me via my web site at http://www.petergrooom.com.
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