Building Efficiency in Your IT Department #3 – Enabling Your Technology to Power Your Organization’s Success

You’ve Planned, Now Let’s Implement! Start Using Project and Task Management Systems I’ve seen many situations where IT departments say they are overwhelmed and, at the same time, senior leadership is critical of IT’s ability to produce results. In these situations, unless IT can provide a clear understanding of what they are facing and propose a solution, IT will not gain trust or the needed support.

The goal of the project/task system, much like the ticketing system we covered in Part 1, is multifold. Not only does it establish accountability, it creates visibility, an understanding of the technical business requests, and a roadmap for prioritization, resource allocation, and budget expectations. For me this is where the rubber meets the road. Proficient management and task systems, based on a well-constructed IT plan, should reduce the number of tickets and create a more productive environment. The project management “system” can be as simple as MS Excel or as advanced as MS Project. It’s purpose is to offer a high level view of all active, back-logged, and pending projects, show proposed vs predicted deadlines and outline bottlenecks.

However, the task management “system” should be a more robust software package. Look for these features as you review your options:

• Serves as an actual change management system
• Provides detailed information and checklists within tasks
• Capable of tracking estimated and actual time to complete tasks
• Is deadline driven
• Includes option to assign tasks to individual or individuals
• Provides for comments within a task and an audit trail
• Is searchable
• Incorporates the ability to template tasks

Again, I recommend putting in place an ongoing process to manage the work as follows:

• Based on your IT plan (click here to see the article on creating a plan) and related project priorities, put all the project tasks for the next month into a “system”. We use Liquid Planner, but Excel will do.
• Assign estimated hours for each task.
• Arrange your tasks into a cycle, 1 week, 2 weeks, etc. We work in two week cycles, but this is pure preference.
• Allocate the tasks and analyze the data. Are resources balanced, will all the tasks be accomplished in a 40 hour+ work week, where are your dependencies? You might need to push tasks into the next cycle, which may extend project deadlines, or you may need more resources or to assign more people to the tasks. Either way, this is very transparent now.
• Hold a 15 minute daily standup and weekly meeting to review daily task progress and weekly cycle burn rate.
• Conduct post-mortem’s on projects – What was successful, what could we have done better in the areas of communication, efficiency, or quality?

Attaining Proactive IT Network Management: Avoid Frustrations and Gain Time to Innovate

Our approach throughout this series is to recommend systematizing your practices and processes, in this case proactive network management. Networks need to be managed and only proactive practices yield time for innovation. Monitoring, maintenance, and checklists are the keys to a well-run network. All three can be systematized so the majority of time is spent on improvement, not support.

• Setup a monitoring system to alert on warnings (not broken, but going to break) and critical items (broken, needs immediate attention), and provide a dashboard to overall system health.
• Perform monthly system maintenances. Some tasks can be done during normal business hours. And reserve one night a month, every month, where systems go offline for reboots and updates.
• Have extremely clear checklists in place for maintenances and configurations. Checklists should incorporate everything from “make sure backups are successful, test file restore” to “notify staff 1 week, 3 days, 2 hours before maintenance.”
• Don’t discredit risk, trust by verify. Many organizations don’t take their risk and liability seriously and only realize it when it is too late. Risk ranges from meeting industry compliance requirements, insurance requirements, to internal cost of data loss or downtime. How sure are you of these areas, are you willing to risk your job or company on it?
  • Does your organization have to follow any regulations, HIPPS, SEC, etc.?
  • Do you have cyber liability insurance?
  • Is your organization required by contracts to have certain systems in place?

As we have said before, an effective technology department is an essential element to leveraging technology for our business’ success. And, while this series has covered systems in the context of technology, our approach and many of these tools such as task management, communications and planning, are transferable to a wide range of organizational activities.

We urge you to implement the processes and systems outlined in this series to help your organization thrive. Part 1 and Part 2 of the series can be accessed on our blog.