MDE News

New books offer
Did you know that before I finished the tenth and last book of my IT Manager Development Series I sold over 100 full series to IT managers and hopeful managers all over the world? In fact, my second order was for the full series when I only had two books completed. 86% of all orders are still for the full series because it's the best value for the money.

These "early buyers" are special to me and will receive a 40% discount on any IT manager development product or service I offer now and in the future. They took a risk and their early purchases motivated me to complete the full series. After completing the ten books, I packaged 80 tools I developed and used over the years to help me manage my IT organizations and called it the IT Manager ToolKit. Most of the early buyers weren't aware that they would receive the ToolKit for free, mainly because I didn't even know I would develop it. It's one of the things I've tried to do to "over deliver".

IT Tidbits Corner

Newsletter stats
Are you interested in who reads this newsletter? Here are just a few "tidbits" of information about the Practical Tips newsletter:

First edition  -  April 2001
# subscribers  -  3033
Subscriber occupation:
   58% - IT Manager
   25% - Executives
   14% - Technical
   3%   - Sales / other
Subscriber's company size:
   15%  -  <10 employees
   21%  -  10-99
   33%  -  100-999
   20%  -  1000-10,000
   11%  -  >10,000
Country:
    51%  -  US
    5%    -  Canada
    4%    -  Australia
    4%    -  United Kingdom
    3%    -  India
    33%  -  All other

I don't have any 40% discount offers for all my products anymore, but I do try to slide in an incentive every now and then. That leads me to this newest "pre-release" offer for the new titles that are under development for 2003. Having "pre-release" orders puts pressure on me to complete the work and I always work better under pressure.

So, here's the offer.
Buy any of the titles before they are released and you will receive a 20% discount. Buy all three together and save a little more. My books will continue to be published in Adobe PDF format (ebooks) for the foreseeable future as I focus time and energy on developing new content and not the time it takes to publish them in paper format.

Target delivery dates of the three ebooks:
May 2003   Practical IT Policies and Procedures
Aug 2003   Building a Responsive Help Desk
Nov 2003    IT Management Models

Your early order discount will be based upon a retail price of $29.95 per book. It's very likely that the IT Policies and Procedures and the IT Management Models books will sell for more. If they do, you simply save more. If you are one of my original "early buyers", be sure to include your discount code to get your 40% discount. Early buyers ordered the full series prior to 3/22/02. If you aren't sure if you qualified for that level, send me an email and I'll let you know.

For more information on this offer and Table of Contents of each book, go to:
http://www.mde.net/tools/newbooks/index.html .

IT Manager Development Program coming soon
Development of a comprehensive 5-day training class is underway and targeted for early summer. This program promises to be more than a training class because it will include follow-up mentoring from me and you will walk out with a specific 30-day action plan designed to help you improve the delivery of your organization's IT services.

This intensive training program is the most exciting project yet and is the culmination of two years preparation. Participants of the first class will receive a major fee discount and extra 'take home' material as a way to show my appreciation for helping me "kick off" the program.

If you are interested in making an investment that pushes your IT management skills to a higher level quickly, send me an email and let me know. Stay tuned for more.

Practical IT Manager Tips 

"If it isn't broken, don't fix it."

I can't tell you how many times I've seen an IT organization conjure up a project just for the sake of doing something they wanted to do. Never mind what the company or their clients really need, "let's go do something really 'neat'" seems to be the theme of the day.

Let me give you a specific example. I conducted an IT assessment for a small manufacturing company last year. The CEO called me in because his IT organization was proposing a $380,000 network upgrade. The CEO had questions as to whether he really needed to spend that kind of money on their network, he wanted to believe in his IT staff, but he had discomfort with the proposal and couldn't put a finger on it.

This scenario takes place thousands of times every day all over the world. Bringing in a consultant is not what the CEO really wants to do. For one thing, it casts doubt on the IT organization. Another issue is that it's not cheap, , or is it?

Let's say getting an objective opinion can be one of the most inexpensive investments a company can make and may turn out to be one of the best values you can get. In this particular case, we saved the company over $300,000 by doing a simple 2-week IT assessment.

The problem was that the IT staff was managed by a manager that had minimal experience in management but lots of knowledge and experience in networks. As a result, the projects he focused the IT group on tended to be infrastructure related. The good news here was that the network infrastructure was exemplary and had a minimum of 99.8% uptime. The data center was as organized and stable as any I have ever seen  -  truly excellent. It also had significant scalability due to some recent staff downsizing. Sound familiar?

On the other hand, users were irate about the support from IT. The problem was simple and so was the solution. IT placed priority on the technology (networks and servers) and not on the user (business applications and Help Desk). My recommendation was to scratch the network upgrade and focus attention on the business applications where the company could gain real value from its IT investment.

The bottom line is that we didn't fix what was working, saved the company significant dollars, and focused the IT group in areas that improved the company's earnings in a very short amount of time. Remember, "Don't fix what isn't broken.".

IT Management Models

Drain the swamp & stop fighting the alligators

Too many IT organizations run by the "seat of their" pants" and are reactive in nature. I'm sure you've seen it, even heard people express symptoms of the problem like,
        "We are too busy & don't have time to plan."
        "We have too much work to do."
        "Projects aren't finished on time because of 
              constant interruptions and surprises."

Every manager has the opportunity to establish an environment that is predictable and that clients can rely on. For some, however, getting there is a very long step to take.

One of the reasons many managers find themselves in an environment that is constantly full of surprises and reactive is that they are so busy fighting alligators (dealing with problems) that they forget to "drain the swamp".

The point is that every organizational situation has key issues that need to be addressed to turn it from a reactive environment to one that is more predictable. You have to identify your key problems (i.e., the alligators) and determine how to eliminate them. No swamp, no alligators to fight.

Key points to the model:
   -  Define your mission & plan your initiatives
   -  Dedicate resources to primary objectives
   -  Eliminate the source of problems vs. spending 
          resources on fixing problems

Drain the swamp is a key model every IT manager needs to pay attention to. Lack of clear objectives and failure to maintain focus causes more productivity loss than anything I know of.

"War Story" Lessons

Where are your 'backup diskettes' ?

Back in the early days of minicomputers, IBM introduced systems that used diskettes for backup instead of tapes that had been used for 20 years. The minicomputer brought into the fray a whole new type of client - the "first time user".

A great lesson I learned in those days was to inspect closely to absolutely insure your client understands what you are saying.

It all began when I went to a client that I had inherited from an SE (IBM Systems Engineer) that had moved onto new opportunities. My objective was to help the client upgrade to a newer disk drive that had more capacity.

This particular upgrade required both a reinstall of the operating system and a restore of the client's data. My job was to prepare the client for the disk swap when the CE arrived and after the hardware change was in place to restore the system for operation. No big deal and I had done many before.

After talking through the steps to be taken with the client, I asked about their Systems Backup and their File Backup at which point they told me they were in the file cabinets stored away. All systems 'GO'.

The CE swaps out the disk drive and hands the project back over to me. I immediately ask the client for their Systems Backup and for their Data Backup and get the reply, "What's a System Backup".

Letters from the Field

"How do we overcome the poor reputation IT has in our company?"

"Rome was not conquered in a day.", they say. To turn a poor situation around takes focus, commitment, hard work, and time. If you have a bad situation, it didn't get into this state of affairs over night. Neither will it be fixed over night.

Start by identifying the key problems that's leading to client satisfaction. I use the word 'client' for both internal employees that use technology as well as external clients that pay you for services.

Once you know what your root problems are, determine what it takes to fix them. It may be organizational focus, possibly managing expectations better, or even eliminating some things that you are trying to do because it's either not that important or the IT organization isn't up to the task.

It is always key that you manage the delivery of your services to match up with both your capabilities as well as capacity. Signing up for something when you don't have one of those two elements is pure suicide so if you have such a situation, get it fixed promptly.

Unlike what you may feel, your clients really do want you to succeed. They will always push you for more, and you can either sign up for too much and fail or sign up for an appropriate level of service, deliver consistently, and succeed, , , every time!!

Keys to improving your client satisfaction levels:
- Back off of unrealistic commitments and re-establish what
      you can do.
- Organize your deliverables in small chunks that you know
      you can deliver.
- Always quantify what you can do and can't.
- Build some buffer into your commitments (surprises do
      happen in the IT world so plan for them).
- Coach your staff to over communicate:
       -  Be aggressive in follow-up and calling back.
       -  Strive to never leave the client in the dark.
       -  Don't commit to deadlines unless you can deliver and
             if you commit, you had better make it happen.

Clients want results and need you to do what you say you will, and consistently. Most clients are more forgiving than you may think but lose their confidence and it's all over. Do these things with a positive mindset and you will improve your situation.

?

Yep, you guessed it, , , they didn't have an Operating System backup, or at least none we could find. In normal circumstances, this would be ok but today I didn't have a copy with me so I could reload the O/S.

I had to call our office 150 miles away and get a copy sent to me so I could finish the job the next day. Later the next day, the O/S software I needed arrived, I reloaded the system (took an hour versus the 10 minutes it should have taken) and I completed the job. The client lost about 4 more hours of uptime than necessary but the biggest problem I had was the ridicule dished out by my IBM 'buddies'.

It gave me a keen sense of inspecting answers from clients to be sure that what I think I have, I really do have.

Product & Services Review

MIS Management Support System (MSS)

If you have read much of my material, you know that I'm a big believer in tools that help me organize, monitor, and manage my IT organization. In January, I ran across a great set of tools that in some respects parallels some of my own work. Charles Brown has developed an excellent set of modules that make up his MSS application and that provides IT managers help in many key areas.

The modules of the MSS application include:
    -  Employees           
    -  Quotes                 
    -  Projects
    -  Budgets
    -  Purchase Orders
    -  Inventory
    -  Owners
    -  Journals
    -  Miscellaneous

Each module provides meaningful tools to help you maintain key records of information that is organized and easily accessible in your day to day activity. The application is completely modular so you can pick and choose features that are helpful for you the way you want to work. For example, the Employee module tracks everything from training and vacation taken to work hours as you need. It even interfaces with the Project and Quoting modules as potential resources for assignment to tasks.

Some parts are a bit overkill for how I would track information in an organization but it was obvious to me that there is significant capability in this application that can be helpful to a lot of managers. If you are interested in taking a look, the web site is at http://www.msstools.com/index.html .

Another thing I liked about the tools are that they are written in Clarion, a great tool to develop small database applications. Clarion applications tend to be 'bullet proof' and work as advertised with little or no software support required. If you need to make a change, the software development tool allows you to make changes quickly and easily so any application built with Clarion is very easy to maintain and to enhance.

The cost for MSS is currently $99.00 for a single user and is well worth the price if nothing more than the ideas you get from the many reports already built into the system that can help you organize your business.

Until next time, I hope the little bit of information provided in this newsletter is helpful to you. Feel free to pass it along to other IT managers you know. Work hard, stay focused, and take time to smell the roses along the way.

                                            Mike Sisco