Read Online IT Manager's Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done by Bill Holtsnider, Brian D. Jaffe - Free Book Online

grown tired of complaining and have just given up. You and your department should always strive to be better. Of course, “better” may have different meanings:
•Better Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
•Faster transactions
•Greater regulatory compliance
•More thorough documentation
•Higher system availability
•Better reliability
•Improved morale
•Fewer errors
•Processes with fewer steps
•Better communication with the user community
    You certainly weren’t chosen for this role to make things worse, and they probably wouldn’t have selected you if all they needed was someone to keep things as they are. It’s important to remember that making things better is often an iterative process, where a few changes now are followed by additional changes down the road, each contributing a little bit toward overall improvement.
    For example, there are a number of things you can do to increase the up time of a database:
•Keep the database software up to date with vendor patches and fixes
•Run periodic recommended database maintenance procedures
•Stay abreast of suggestions and guidelines from the vendors (hardware, database, OS) on best practices
•Ensure that the database server doesn’t have other applications running on it, which can increase the chances of crashes
•Keep the server’s operating system up to date with vendor patches and fixes
    Each of these steps can improve the reliability of the database to various degrees. Taken together, they may significantly improve the uptime statistics.
    You may find that a similar approach works best in improving the overall performance of your department. Although there may be a small number of things that can be changed to have a big impact, your focus should also be on the continual process of small improvements that chip away at problem areas. From your perspective as a manager, it’s sometimes very difficult to see changes on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis. You frequently have to look back over a period of months, or sometimes a year, and ask “remember when we used to … ?”
    People to Meet and Know
    At this point you’re busy developing relationships with your staff, your peers, and your boss, but it doesn’t end there. There are many people you should establish relationships with. It’s a good idea to start collecting names and setting up introductory meetings with key people you’ll be working with. Your boss, your peers, and even your staff can offer some names. If you were promoted into your new role without changing companies, you may already know many of these names. You may even have relationships with many of them, but you now need to forge those relationships from the perspective of the IT Manager.
    Some areas you’ll want to be sure to connect with include:
• Key user areas: Find out which areas are most dependent on IT and the services IT provides. Meet with those department heads, learn how they use IT, when they have their busiest periods, etc. Examples may include marketing and sales, accounting, HR, and manufacturing departments.
• Senior executives: It’s always a good idea to have a strong relationship with upper management. Learn which ones are big proponents of IT and which have the worst experiences with IT. In addition to building a good rapport with executives, you should do the same with their assistants.
• Human resources: As described later in the section ( “Human Resource Issues” on page 25 ), you’ll probably quickly discover many HR issues. Find out who in HR you can work with to review different situations.
• Finance and accounting: IT often has one of the largest departmental budgets. You’ll want to have someone to partner with in accounting to help you deal with budgeting issues, chargebacks, forecasting, tracking spending, etc. IT budgeting is discussed in depth in Chapter 6, Managing the Money on page 161 .
• Procurement: IT has a large budget because it buys a lot of expensive hardware,