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Relationships: Managers are From Mars; Users are From Uranus
For folks like us who are used to hard and fast network metrics, looking at relationships as a key factor in our operational life can be uncomfortable. There's no way to measure or touch them, yet they're incredibly important to our political lives. But if you can't measure them precisely, you can at least categorize them and thereby keep an eye on them.
Obviously, in a discipline where no individual has full view of the entire picture, teamwork within the department is incredibly important. But what about teamwork with the larger organization?
Clearly, you need to keep an eye on relationships both with upper management and with the departments at large.
As far as departmental relationships go, here are some good rules of thumb:
>> Get feedback. It's difficult to navigate the waters of a relationship without a road map. The feedback can be face time, such as courtesy calls in which a supervisor shows up and asks if everything's OK (much like a maître d' in a restaurant); or it may be follow-up phone calls after work orders are complete or even intranet feedback forms. We find that a mix works pretty well.
>> Be courteous about scheduling work. This means more than just scheduling downtime for the server or other infrastructure. It means, from a tactical point of view, not just showing up at a user's desk and effectively ordering the user out of the way while you perform a work order.
Other people have work to do, and it generates an incredible amount of enmity when you or your team interrupts that work to carry out your duties; it sends a signal that you feel your work is more important than someone else's work. Train your team to ask what a good time might be to perform the project in question rather than dictate. Good change management also helps (see "Managing Change").
>> Respond to anger by listening; turn the subjective complaint into an objective goal. This is tough sometimes. Still, a user's anger can be a wake-up call that will lead you to discover something that needs fixing either organizationally or technologically.
>> Always keep the high moral ground. If disagreements end up being arbitrated by a third party, and the other party has written e-mail with a nasty edge while you have kept your cool, you have a better chance of coming out on top.
>> Identify and accomplish small tasks that help individuals. In central IT, we tend to focus on large projects. However, the small efforts make people's work lives better and not only contribute to the success of your organization in a very organic, incremental way, but also contribute in a big way to goodwill aimed at your department.
Do these rules seem to be simple common sense? Certainly, to many of us, they do. Still, folks with whom we've spoken in the top 25 Fortune 500 companies tell us that these rules are commonly broken, with anger and antipathy toward IT as the result.
For example, one human-resources user at a top financial corporation described a technician simply showing up at her office while she wasn't there to look into a slowness problem she had reported to the helpdesk. Instead of diagnosing first, then scheduling the fix with the user, the tech elected to swap her hard drive and put in a known good system image.
She came back to discover that, though the first problem had been solved, her computer now had neither the critical applications she needed, nor her data files. The technician was gone when she returned to her office, and it took another business day to rectify the situation. She was, in effect, down and unable to work on a major project that she needed to work on. Major anger here, not to mention loss of productivity.
Even if you don't give a rat's whisker about the relationship for relationship's sake, bear this in mind: When that server upgrade dinks up, folks will tend to be more forgiving if you've been treating them as business partners rather than "lusers."
Encounters with the Rich and Powerful
You might not have direct interaction with upper management, but even if you're not the top IT manager, you can still help these relationships. Unless you're in a military-like organization that enforces chain of command, the likelihood is that you will be meeting with and interacting with top brass. Instead of merely doing a good job of explaining the technology, you can take the opportunity to enlist a powerful ally. One of the ways you can do this is to ask questions about the business process, and understand where the bottlenecks are and how applying IT might help.
IT workers commonly complain about VIPs. But again, here's an opportunity to change a subjective complaint into an objective goal. For example, a common complaint is that a member of upper management simply isn't marching with the band, is using technologies that aren't the corporate standard, is perhaps bypassing security mechanisms in the name of expediency and so on.
Trust us. You cannot fight VIPs by acting draconian. Techs at one of our partner labs report that they "stopped" a department head from specifying a nonstandard Web technology, smug in the assurance that they controlled the DMZ -- no means no. Next thing they knew, ADSL was being installed in the department, along with a new server, $60,000 worth of consulting without IT onboard and a big headache in terms of integrating this department head's existing data with the new (totally out of control and unsecured) server.
So instead of fighting a battle you can't win, why not go with the flow a bit and try to understand the reasons behind the actions. You may surprise yourself. You may realize that, indeed, what your department is offering is not conducive to business as done by the VIP's department and in fact letting this VIP drive a little bit of the IT initiative might help everybody out.
Don't forget: It takes business knowledge plus IT knowledge to create a great IT solution. A VIP can be a huge contributor of business knowledge, so with a bit of respectful communication and give and take, you may discover that not only have you helped out the VIP and the organization but have also enlisted a great technology advocate.
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