Telecom & Technology Consulting
Dogma doesn’t only exist in politics and religion, it also pervades the world of IT management practices. Many “best practices” have been carried out for so long, leaders assume that they are ironclad, always the best strategy for a given initiative.
But as in other areas of society, “the way it’s always been done” in IT departments must be questioned and re-examined. Especially when those time-honored practices actually hinder productivity rather than improving performance inherit in their claims.
Reorganizing is one of the most popular, knee-jerk strategies to reverse a perceived lack of efficiency. The belief is that changing reporting relationships will eliminate barriers to enhanced productivity. But as it turns out, in most cases you end up replacing one set of roadblocks with another. Besides, slotting employees into different departments and roles doesn’t tackle the key issue: how work gets done.
To improve productivity, leaders often promote the idea of multitasking. The premise is that skilled, intelligent employees are capable of simultaneously juggling multiple responsibilities. Studies have proven, however, that as the time devoted to multitasking increases, people lose time due to having to reorient themselves to tasks, which ends up reducing productivity.
It’s almost impossible to fully eliminate multitasking –it’s part of everyday work culture, and our tendency as employees is to always try to squeeze in a bit extra. Instead of having staff do multiple tasks at once, educate them on the benefits of focused, single-task work.
Another chestnut of management best practices is to hold people accountable when something goes astray. According to this line of thinking, a culture of accountability cuts down on mistakes and inspires employees to go the extra mile. Yet that approach assumes that human error is the problem, when in fact mistakes are more often due to flawed systems and processes.
Stop blame-shifting. Instead, investigate the underlying systems and processes that caused the mistake. This strategy significantly reduces the chances of the same error occurring again across the entire IT staff.
A related management best practice is for employees to keep management in the loop when potential issues arise. Leaders don’t want to be caught off-guard; they want to resolve a problem before it leaks to others in the company. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The problem occurs when making leaders aware of an issue becomes more important than the employee resolving the issue proactively, on their own.
This hierarchal process can drain time and impede progress. Busy leaders aren’t always immediately available, and they may not get around to looking into the problem for days or weeks. Avoid costly delays by empowering staff, communicating that their priority is to attempt a fix, and only then call on leadership for help as a last resort.
Productivity loss can also stem from the wrong promotional scheme. Often, project managers get moved into full-fledged managerial roles, the assumption being that success in the former correlates to success in the latter. But this switch may not provide ample time for the project manager to hone his/her capabilities – the promotion was too quick. As a result, the overall project management competence may suffer.
Establish a formal project management path with milestones for achievement and education. Retain those in the project management role who are the most enthusiastic and skilled in that position. By doing so, leaders develop a continually growing group of world-class project managers who will be there for the long run. When someone leaves the organization, there will always be others waiting in the wings to step in, with no drop in competence and expertise.
By no means should CIOs do away with certain best practices just because they appear archaic. Many of those processes have stood the test time because they’re successful, over and over again throughout the years, across industries. The key for leaders is to examine the assumptions behind those practices, and see if other factors are the actual causes of productivity decreases. Sometimes conventional wisdom works, sometime it doesn’t. Learn the difference.
