Extensive remorse is the least you can do with these IT management sins.
Foto: Pixel-Shot – shutterstock.com
If you’re a CIO or IT manager, you have a variety of sources to seek advice on how to work more effectively. We recommend, of course, a visit to COMPUTERWOCHE or CIO.de. If you are very desperate, you can also find corresponding entries at Gartner, Forrester or McKinsey.
In most cases, you will read how you as an IT decision-maker should set your priorities correctly. After consuming such – in fact not wrong, but maximally repetitive – content, you will probably often think to yourself (not wrongly): “Yes, it was already clear beforehand, wasn’t it?”. With this article we want to take a different approach and give you advice that you won’t find anywhere else (no thanks).
Once you have internalized the following to-don’t list, the question arises as to which point you should tackle first. If you find the time to focus on one or even several aspects in parallel, there are actually only two options:
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Either you are (still) in pretty good shape for an IT decision maker or
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They have already reached a heightened level of delusion, so that nothing matters anyway.
1. Managing too much, leading too little
Okay, we lied. Our first mistake is one that you have not read about before, but rather read too much about: managing instead of leading. There’s an old joke about a dog that has no legs: His owner took him out for a “train” every morning.
Leadership makes the difference: Do you drag your employees through the day or do they move independently in the right direction?
2. Lead too much, manage too little
Management primarily means ensuring that the work of the company you are responsible for gets done.
To achieve this, leadership is a useful tool (see above). But by no means the only one. However, if your focus is too much on leadership, you risk losing sight of what you’re being paid to do and putting too much effort into being inspirational.
3. Arguing about money
Chargebacks fall into the realm of “grand theory.” This means that cost center managers will make more prudent IT decisions when they are billed for the IT resources they use. Disputes can arise when it comes to the amount of the bill. IT can calculate chargebacks in two ways:
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The easy way: The IT budget is allocated to cost center managers based on an easy-to-understand metric, such as a percentage of total employees or the company budget.
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Or IT calculates granular computing unit costs for each type of IT resource, monitors consumption and multiplies it by the unit cost.
Forget the easy approach. The thing that makes it attractive – its simplicity – also makes it pointless. Ultimately, cost center managers have no way to reduce costs by reducing IT resource consumption. If you still take this route, you must expect to waste a lot of time and nerves arguing about correct billing. And no matter who wins this dispute in the end: everyone involved loses.
4. Desperate to be in business
It’s a strange piece of advice that persists in many guides: technology decision-makers supposedly shouldn’t be tech people. At this point we should take a step back. And first take a deep breath. Then let’s look at the facts: Firstly, it is undeniably easier to “be” business than tech. Second, do you agree that the Chief Financial Officer should not be a finance expert and the Chief Marketing Officer should not be a marketing expert? (If yes, you can shut down your computer now.)
CIOs who obsessively try to be “business people” instead of technologists are a bit like the misfits they used to be in school, desperately trying to get into the cool kids’ club. Even back then (in the vast majority of cases) this led to unsatisfactory results.
5. Use “architect” as a verb
That’s just our opinion, but sentences like: “We have to architect a solution” indicate someone who also didn’t make it into the club of smooth business people – and is now ingratiating himself with the technology cracks.
6. Apply “best” practices
Getting annoyed with colleagues who interpret “best practice” rather broadly – for example as a minimum standard for professional work – is a hopeless and pointless endeavor.
In this respect, we move directly to the next point.
7. Product instead of project management
Project management is the way companies shape their future – in a planned and conscious way. Product management, on the other hand, refers to the business discipline of managing the development of a product or product line in order to increase its attractiveness on the market.
IT product management comes from the agile world and has, at best, a loose connection to product management in companies. Although it makes sense to some extent to increase the attractiveness of part of a company’s technology or application portfolio, that is not the goal of IT product management. Rather, it is about creating responsibilities and decision-making authority. (fm)
