Tag: #IT Management

I stared at the list of requests the team was working on. Seven people, ninety-three active requests. Over ten active requests for each person. The team was working hard, but it felt like we weren’t making progress. Requests were not getting completed, and it felt like we were the bottleneck. The IT department’s to-do list…

The processes in our companies are the activities that must take place to satisfy the Customer. Regular processes are those that provide value to the products and services our company provides. We need to be good at these. Exception processes are those that deal with problems when they come up. These are the processes that,…

All organizations use business processes to get work done. Most business processes in larger organizations rely on computers and software. IT’s role is to make sure the business process, as implemented in technology, changes as the organization changes.  This requires that IT understands the business processes well enough to do our job correctly.  Each process…

I wrote this book as I was finishing my career in IT. It was the first book I wrote as I started on my writing journey. The results turned out pretty well. IT is a complicated business. The job of an IT Leader isn’t just about technology. The organization you operate in and the people…

There are many books and articles about leadership; I hope you read some of them. There is no absolutely right model of leadership, so read widely and make up your own mind on what makes a good leader. This section covers something I noticed long ago about leadership styles which I haven’t seen it in…

Here are a couple of articles about the Solarwinds hack that messed up a lot of companies. The first is relatively soon after the event and the second is later. Putting them here for future reference. https://www.wired.com/story/solarwinds-hack-supply-chain-threats-improvements (Dec 2021) https://www.wired.com/story/the-untold-story-of-solarwinds-the-boldest-supply-chain-hack-ever (May 2023)

Ever since there have been internal departments like IT (and HR and Finance) there has been a drive for those groups to call the rest of the business “customers.” I believe this is a bad idea and hurts the organization. This sentiment shows up like this: Seems straightforward, right? To be clear, IT departments must…

We are all familiar with the saying that speed matters in business. Similarly, if everything else is the same, faster is better in business. What we don’t talk about often enough is who needs to be faster. Does an individual need to be fast? Does a department need to be fast? Does a company need…

As a developer, I was always tempted to put messages like this in the parts of the code that should never execute. I did a couple of times, although never this clever. I have not kept up on the latest programming languages, but I imagine that it is still possible to have these places of despair. These…

https://seths.blog/2023/12/rewrite-for-humans/ Another Seth Godin post worth thinking about. When organizations write to employees or customers, the writing is often unnecessarily complicated. He gives a great example. I think part of the tradeoff is the level of detail. The organization wants to be seen as providing lots of information, often to answer questions that may come…

We’ve all heard it: “Prevention is better than cure.” But let’s face it, prevention is unsatisfying. We’ll never know for sure if it was worth it. But hey, we still gotta do it.

This Thursday, I will be presenting a session at the Minnesota Agile Community. The title is “Using a Low-Overhead Agile Process for a new Data Warehouse Buildout”. In the session, I will tell the story of a long-term Agile project that built out a data warehouse, including data imports, models, and multiple reporting technologies. Take…

I was researching a vendor today and came across a limit of “200 pages”*. What likely happened was some technical person in their organization figured that telling customers that 200 is a limit will avoid problems. Was there formal research on the 200 number? Probably not. Would 150 or 250 been better? That probably wasn’t…

A company I’m working with was implementing a major software change. The decision to do so was made several executives ago. The current executive felt the decision was wrong for the organization, and made the right call to switch. The company had invested heavily in that decision and would lose that money. Others might have…

This handy little piece of 3D printing was created for an ERP upgrade that our team did a few years ago. Justin, a Business Analyst on the team had a side interest in 3D…

It is easier to start something than to maintain, or continue, that something.

https://future.com/securing-the-software-supply-chain/ Open Source is a great way to quickly develop applications and services for IT departments. The software supply chain refers to the process of writing and building software, including all of the open source that goes into it. Open source isn’t without risks. The risks around using software you don’t know is not hard…

Folks, I did a thing and it is now available for sale from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine bookstores. The I.T. Leader’s Handbook is a book for current and aspiring IT leaders. From the back cover: Is your IT department working harder than ever and still falling behind? Does the organization have unreasonable…