It’s Q4, is your house in order?

4^th Quarter always seems to be the busiest quarter of the year; add in elections and you have a quarter fraught with disruptions. For CIO's and IT Directors, it's the inevitable question – "did my team contribute to the success of the company this year?" There should be metrics readily available to prove or disprove this question. Hopefully, the question isn't, "Did my team's dysfunctions take away from the stability of the company this year?" If so, there are bigger issues that probably can't be resolved by (successful) strategy meetings with the business before the end of the year.

I'm sure there are some that are thinking, it's December 1, what can you possibly accomplish in 30 days? Actually, plan on 19 work days. Many of those days for IT employees will mean catching up with vacation time that you couldn't take at any other time during the year. But, let's take a stab at making that timeline productive. The chances are good more of the business is taking vacation, so, overall, the office should be quieter than the norm.

Day 19 – Pull in your management team or leads and review with them what the purpose of the strategy meetings is going to be – determine how to provide excellent IT services in a manner that supports the business.

Days 18-14 – prep for meetings with the business

• Review year to date outages
  
  • Do you have metrics necessary to segregate the outages by function and reason?
    
    • If not, you need to create an independent Incident Management team
      
  • Have the issues that caused the outages been worked through?
    
    • If not, you need to establish a stronger root cause analysis protocol and create an independent Incident Management team to manage those type of incidents
      
  • Have either quick-fixes or permanent solutions been implemented?
    
    • If not, you need to create an independent Incident Management team to manage that process
      

Note, the recurring theme. If sufficient focus is not being given to understand, shorten and preventing outages, you have zero credibility with the business. Not a good place for a CIO or IT Director to be in.

• Review incident and problem ticket totals
  
  • Do you have the metrics necessary to segregate the incidents by business unit, infrastructure component and application?
    
  • Are issues being resolved within the established Service Level's (SLA's)?
    
  • Are customers complaining?
    
  • Does someone in IT have regular meetings with the business to go over problem tickets? If not, why not?
    
    • An IT team that has regular meetings with the business to HEAR their issues is an informed team.
      
      • The takeaways from those meetings should be ACTIONABLE. Otherwise, the business will become impatient. The purpose of the meetings should be clearly understood – you tell us what's wrong, we'll present you with solutions.
        
      • If the complaints are too ambivalent, meet with management to get to the bottom of the ambivalence.
        
    • The business needs to feel that they are heard or they will stop listening to the IT team and go elsewhere.
      
• Review IT Spend
  
  • Where did you spend money this year?
    
    • This should be fresh in everyone's minds as the 2013 budget planning sessions should have been completed just months before.
      
    • Money follows problems so if the money you are spending or planning to spend is NOT being used to a) understand, shorten and prevent outages and b) correct problem and incident ticket issues – you may have a disconnect that needs to be resolved.
      
    • Are you spending sufficiently to hire and train IT staff? Are you offering CBT and online training courses? Are you insuring they have sufficient time within the workday to keep up with evolving technology?
      
    • Are you providing your IT team the tools they need to efficiently do their jobs in a timely fashion?
      
  • Are you planning more spend to support or grow your business?
    
    • Does that coincide with the business leader goals?
      

 

Now that you have this information at hand, you can begin strategy meetings with the business. Better late than not at all. The best scenario here is for you to already have regular strategy meetings with the business and you can simply review where you and they are and what you can do to make the coming year better for both teams.

Days 13, 11, 9, 7 – Meet with the business

Days 12, 10, 8 and 6 – Meet as a team to review the information provided by the business and brainstorm as to resolutions. Include as many of your IT team as you can. They need to feel engaged and part of the solutions. While it may slow the process a bit, you need to embrace the craziness that is your team. The brightest IT people are not always managers or leads. Make the situation work for your whole team. If staffing is an issue, rotate in and out the IT team members that can attend.

[Separately, the CIO or IT Director should provide feedback to the business of what was heard. This may or not match up with what the business meant. BE SURE.]

• No idea should be thrown off the table
  
• All ideas should be assigned to someone other than the person proposing it to look at pros and cons
  
• This should be a collaborative effort, but the person proposing the idea has "game" in the solution, you want this to be a fair collaborative effort.
  
• Part of this process should be comparing the results of your prep meetings with the responses from the business and where each business issue fits.
  
  • If there is not a direct correlation, in theory, there should be. Investigate. It is your job to support the business.
    
  • You won't be effective in the business' eyes if your goals don't coincide with and support the business focuses.
    
• Invite trusted vendor partners to review your feedback. Ask what they are seeing in the industry.
  
• Meet with peers to ask what they are doing in problem areas.
  

  
   

Day 5 – Meet with Managers and Leads again to review progress, status and plans. Now is the time to trim out the proposed solutions that are a) too costly, b) too obscure that would take focus off of your core competencies and environment.

Day 4 – Prioritize your efforts and narrow the scope. If you don't narrow the scope you'll be playing darts with dull points because nothing will actually get accomplished.

Day 3 – Communicate with the business what your plans and takeaways are. Give them proposed timelines, letting them know that the dates could shift.

Day 2 – Call today IT Appreciation Day. Make it an annual event. Invite everyone to nominate someone for appreciation. Invite vendor partners to donate giveaways.

Day 1 – Actually appreciate everyone. IT teams love food. Give them silly awards that they can keep on their desks. Have drawings for the partner giveaways. Give away tickets to the local NFL football team or the Christmas concert being held or "something".

I don't honestly think IT Teams are appreciated enough because no one really understands what they do. So, to all the IT Teams out there, good job.