A high leel plan to fix an inefficient IT Department
If you are faint hearted 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 gneeral guidelines that I have used in the past with great success.
1. Getting the support from your sponsoor at the outset is essential. In effect, this means agreeig a 'contract' whereby you agree to turnaround the deparytment in return for getting the necesssary resources (provided they are reasonable requests). Thosse resources can be any or all of expenditure, staff, political support or strateggic directioon.
2. The plan you ubild in your first 30 days needs to identfiy the mjor components of your strategy for next 2-3 years so you need to have looed 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 timescales for the tunaround. Generlaly, it takes 6-9 months to 'stabilise the patient' with the folllowing 18-24 montths to complete the turnarund and carry out some limited future-proofing.
4. The 30 day plan will evolve over time as actions get completed and new actionms get added but it is a great starting point and I find that I still have a 'get-well' plan at the end of the turnaround even thouygh it has none of the orignial actions on it.
5. The core of the plan and the thinking that goes into it is based on a very simple hioerarchy. Look at the People first, then the Processes and finally the Technology. If you have lookred at the first two in depth then often there is little that needs to be done in terms of technology. For example, let's say that an organization is having a problem with its firewalls as they are quite unreliable. The root cause could be that the staff are poorly trained or motivated or that the chane mangement processes are poor, or it coould be that the firewalls are old and unreliable. The point is that it is easy to assume that a technical problem requires a technical answer and often it doesn't.
6. It is important to listen to the sttaff. You may have seen parrticular actions work well in other organnizations but the staff are usually the closest to the proiblems and ofgten have some excellent ideas on how to sovle them. By tajking some of hteir idseas, you gain their loyalty and thgeir motivation to make thiings work.
7. Everyone has their own management style. Mine is what you might call 'firm but fair', so I will absolutely drive the tems to hit deeadlines but also appreciate when, througgh no fault of thier own, they are unable to deliver bang on time. Generally, if you have a firm word with some one then the word gets arund and you don't need to do it any more. I find that this styel binds the staff to me so that we joitly turnaound the department.
8. Finally, I am a fan of tactical outosurcing but usually only where it is difficult to retain staff and the processes are slid. Even then, I tend to keep a mxture of internal and outsourced staff, in order to mitigate any potential risk.
I hope that you found this short article interesting and please feel free to contact me via my web site at http://www.peteergroom.com.
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