THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO
One of the most exciting and rewarding parts of being a leader is bringing impactful and positive change to an organization. However, it goes without saying that change isn’t always easy. Outside of just the actual work of implementing change, there can be a whole gamut of hurdles, from the cultural impact to organizational inertia of doing things as they always have been done. One of the most basic change rules I live by is that you can’t change what you can’t measure. In fact, it is an area I have spent a lot of time on with my management teams over the years, especially with newer / less experienced managers. Having the ability to track and measure your team or organization is a key to the success of your teams. It can also have a significant financial impact on your operations. Business leaders want facts and metrics to make decisions, not hunches and assumptions.
In one of my previous IT leadership roles, I quickly identified that I needed to turn the team into a more mature IT organization. There was no formal IT service management (ITSM) platform in place and the managers weren’t using reports or metrics to drive performance, or more importantly accountability. Without the ability to measure, it was impossible to identify areas of improvement. I made it one of my team’s highest priorities to implement a full ITSM platform and develop department scorecards to measure items such as SLAs, workload, and satisfaction ratings. Next, I implemented a network and server monitoring platform which allowed the team to become more proactive instead of reactive to potential problem areas before they became service impacting issues. The net impact of the project was the team became more responsive, generated higher customer satisfaction levels, and prevented future problem recurrences. In the end, a focus on metrics and measuring across IT helped us reduce our IT expenses by $150,000 year! Even within more mature organizations or groups, you must continue to evolve and upgrade your tools to measure as your business evolves. Five years into my current role, I just led a project that went live last week to replace our ITSM platform and several standalone tools into a single unified platform. This will allow us to enhance the measurement of our current processes, but also extend our operational metrics into new areas such as project management, change management, and IT procurement. It was an important business investment for us to continue to be a high-performance IT team. I used a lot of IT related examples above, but any successful business leader knows you can’t change what you can’t measure. I was fortunate early in my career to work for a very good CIO and mentor who provided opportunities to work on a lot of business and performance analytics projects. We developed tools and platforms for our sales, marketing, accounting, and operations teams who used them to drive their team performance. In turn, that improved the business performance. I witnessed firsthand how the tools I helped implement allowed other business leaders make better business decisions. It is those early career opportunities that have helped me become not only a better IT leader but also a better business leader today.
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About Shawn:My philosophy as an IT leader today is that I believe you must first and foremost be a business leader. It is my goal to be a strategic partner with the business to help it make money, save money, and be the absolute best in the industry at what we do. Having the technology competencies and experience is just your entry fee to sit at the table. Every day, I am bringing 20+ years of IT experience to the table in the areas such as:
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