Your infrastructure is only as good as the team behind it
Is it possible to have an IT infrastructure that supports your business well without understanding how you manage the team to run it? Our long experience tells us that not only will poor management and governance practices put your team at risk for high turnover rates (costing you time and money as you scramble to find suitable replacements) but your systems suffer as well from disjointed visions.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to leading high functioning IT teams. What the authors of many management books won’t tell you is that there simply isn’t a silver bullet that can solve all your management woes.
Walker IT Group, LLC has found, however, that there are some fundamental maxims of IT team management:
- A highly functional and efficient IT team is one where a mix of talents and abilities are able to establish effective divisions of labor organically. This requires a management philosophy that is open to experimentation and doesn’t resort to “top-down” command models.
- Information Technology professionals are generally more analytical yet also extremely creative, and resemble highly skilled professionals such as lawyers and scientists in their approach to tasks and projects. This can cause serious misunderstandings when dealing with departments like Sales & Marketing or Human Resources that value more relationship building activities and approaches.
- IT Management teams very often do not do an adequate job of setting or explaining expectations to their teams, and try to rely on edicts and subjective decisions that come across to the IT Professionals as nonsensical or illogical. Illogical thinking is anathema to the skilled IT Pro. We view this as a problem of varying communication styles that can be fixed.
- Given the opportunity, IT Professionals overall are interested in solving business problems and often are given short thrift when they attempt to do so.
We’ve managed IT teams in all sizes of organizations. We know what works and what doesn’t. Your technology infrastructure is only as strong as the people who are running it, and the processes and workflows that support them. We can help drive effective management methods and frameworks such as ITIL, applying only what is needed to fit your particular business.
Unleash the potential of your IT Pros by setting up a work environment that rewards their creativity
By drawing upon our skills and experiences we can help a company implement management processes that don’t get in the way. For example, many companies try to track work items by service tickets. Over time the number of categories used for tickets grows as every minor variation is created as a category. When this happens your IT teams start to ignore the categories, there’s just too many from which to choose. The end result is you no longer have a good grasp on the broad categories of issues that are occurring in your organization, causing a company’s leader to miss the proverbial forest for the trees when it comes to how their technology department is doing supporting the organization’s goals.
We are well versed in reviewing a process or workflow, even working to document them when nothing is on paper. Walker IT Group, LLC can then slice through the unnecessary processes, or the overly complicated list of categories, and help you determine what makes sense based on what you really need to track.
We can also help through expert analysis of teams experiencing problems. How do you keep your top performers happy? What’s a good balance of skills that’s needed to form a cohesive team? Are lower tier performers dragging down your top IT Pros and consequently your business’s ability to change directions; or are they playing the right part at the right time, in the right key? We can help your organization figure out what works for your teams, but more importantly your business.
Contact us today to learn how we can work together to ensure your IT Pros are given the tools they need to drive efficiencies in your business.