An Hour in the Library

Photo by rachellake@flickr.com

I recently spoke with a company who were setting up a process for estimating project costs, broken down by the services provided by the IT teams. The usual thing, how much for documentation reviews here, time to build servers there, etc. I was struck by the level of detail they were going into. We had a chat about how people were coming up with the time estimates for various tasks.

The person doing the work of gathering estimates, let’s call her B, thought some of the numbers were too high. I asked B why she was asking people for estimates when she already had an idea of what the right answer should be. This was the first attempt at the model. Wasn’t she just wasting a lot of people’s time?

Apparently it was because some of the estimates were much higher relative to what some other people had put down. It seems some people thought it would take 3 hours to review all the documentation, and other people would take 3 days. I suggested to B that, well, these are the subject matter experts, so maybe they’re right? Or maybe they didn’t understand the question?

Fear is the Mind Killer

I asked B what she knew about building a cost model. It turned out she’d never done it before. I suggested that it was a pretty common problem, and that I was fairly sure there’d be books about it. Maybe she could look it up and save herself some work?

On reflection, she thought that sounded pretty good, and if I had any specific references, to please pass them on. This was after about 3 weeks of work, and several rounds of asking SMEs for information.

I see this sort of thing all the time. B didn’t really know what she was doing, but just dove in head first and gave it a go. Many people see that kind of ‘go-getter’ attitude as admirable.

I don’t.

Let’s be clear here: This isn’t being willing to give things a try. This isn’t taking on some Big Hairy Audacious Goal. This is not knowing what to do, not spending any time figuring out what should be done, and just doing something, anything, to hide the fact that you don’t know what you’re doing.

This is diving in head first when the water is 3ft deep, without bothering to check first.

It’s not brave. It’s stupid. Needlessly so.

The Joy of Finding Things Out

“For every problem, there is always a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.”

The issue I have here is not that people shouldn’t experiment and make mistakes and work things out. That’s fine for the genuinely novel. But what we’re talking about here isn’t novel. It’s something that every company has to deal with, and the odds are good that someone, somewhere, has solved at least some of the same problem.

Better yet, at least some of them have probably gone bankrupt while trying out several obvious methods that don’t work.

B was spending a lot of time (and therefore money) re-inventing something on her own. Only without the background. Or training. Or research.

And it wasn’t just her time. It was the time of many of her colleagues. Time spent developing a really precise model that was going to give consistently wrong answers to 5 decimal places. Mistaking precision for accuracy.

Why?

This wasn’t Not Invented Here syndrome. No one was preventing B from re-using existing knowledge from a book, or a Google search.

I think it was because people love discovery. Figuring things out is a lot of fun! That final ‘aha!’ moment when all the pieces come together is one of the best things.

But you don’t re-invent double-entry book keeping on company time. You buy SAP or MYOB.

You don’t try to re-invent the spreadsheet, you use Excel.

The weeks spent re-inventing a known business process is weeks not spent doing all the other things that need to be done. Things that don’t have an off-the-shelf solution ready to be re-used, or slightly adapted.

Special Snowflake Syndrome

Again, I see this a lot. Every customer complains that, yes, that all sounds good in theory, but we do things differently here. Every customer seems to believe that their company is special, and has unique problems that no other company has to deal with. I call it the ’special snowflake syndrome’.

You are not a special snowflake.

Your company has a very small number of unique problems. 98% of the issues you have to deal with are exactly the same as every other company. Accounting: the same. HR: the same. Email: the same. Management: the same.

So why are you wasting so much time re-solving problems someone else has solved for you, when you could be focussing on the few things that genuinely make you different and special? Here’s a hint: your more successful competitor does.

Work Lazier, Not Harder

I’ll finish with one of my favourite pithy phrases:

“A week in the lab will save you an hour in the library.”

This is not your year 11 maths exam. Go look up the answer in a book. Stop spending hours a day re-inventing something that you can find with a Google search.

Get lazy, and you’ll get a lot more done.

Share and Enjoy:

Posted in Business Management, FAIL, General, Rant, Tip.

By Justin Warren

29 August 2010

No comments

ITaaB: IT as a Business

Photo by leeleblanc@flickr.com

There’s a lot of aaS in tech circles right now: Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and so on. They’re all generally lumped together into the one concept of ‘cloud computing’.

The basic idea is that a lot of IT these days can be provided as a pay-as-you-go utility, like electricity or water. You can buy compute power from Amazon EC2 and Google. There are hundreds of companies that will host a virtual machine for you. You can buy cloud storage from dozens of places.

Why Have Internal IT?

That’s a great question. Why indeed? If I can buy my infrastructure by the month from a cloud vendor, why do I need you, Mr. Internal IT man?

If I can buy all the components for my IT needs from external companies, and then they have to hire the IT weenies to keep it running, then they have all the problems of dealing with them and I don’t. That’s a pretty awesome value proposition.

What’s yours?

If you’re a manager in an internal IT unit, you’d better be working on your answer, because this question is going to come up more and more often. If you don’t have a good response, you’re history.

Build a Business

If no one runs their own IT because they all buy it from IT providers, you’ll have to start becoming an IT service provider. Or get a job with one of the providers. Or just leave the industry.

I figure you’re here because you’re a bit of a go-getter who doesn’t want to just run sheepishly for the protection of a safe, boring job inside a utility computing company. You want to show you can run your own show.

If nothing else, you’ll have polished the skills you’ll need if you don’t manage to pull this off.

You need to start running internal IT as if it was external IT. You need to be entrepreneurial. You need to build your own small business inside whatever larger business you’re in right now.

That means you need to learn a lot more about non-technical things, like sales, marketing, customer service, product management, profit margin, cost control, debt collection.

It’s not longer enough to just know how to configure a router. You have to be able to figure out why customers need routers configured, and why they should pay you to do it for them. And then make sure they actually pay you.

No More Geeks

The first thing you need to do is to hire some non-geeks. You’ve already got plenty of techos, but what you don’t have are the people who can talk to other humans outside of IT.

Sales people. Marketing people. PR people. You need people who can sell your department to the business units. People who can manage expectations. People who can solve the “they don’t understand us” problems.

You need people who can make your documentation look pretty. People who can make sure the business units transfer money from their budget into yours (and drag the finance department kicking and screaming into a chargeback model). People who dig people, not just computers.

But they aren’t the people you should hire first. Who should you hire?

Product managers.

Product Managers To The Rescue

You need product managers to bring all the different parts of what you do together, and make them easy to buy. Standardise on whatever is closest to what your customers want to buy already, and then sell it to them. Think McDonalds, not Alfonso’s Boutique Bikes and Custom Rides Emporium.

You need product managers to bundle up these newly created products and put them in front of the sales people you hire second, and get them to go out into the business and sell your products. And come back with valuable intel on what products the customers wish you sold (and better yet, about the products customers actually pay for).

You need product managers to figure out what it costs to make and maintain these products/services that you sell, and make sure you charge enough to at least cover costs.

You need product managers to be responsible for the end-to-end delivery of everything you do right now, only better.

You also need to hire marketing people to help your product managers ensure you’re building the right products, and that the business knows you have them for sale.

These people may actually all be one person, or you might have one product manager and one sales/marketing person. You get to figure out what works best for you.

But know this: you don’t get to slide by with just IT people any more.

Make Money

Finally, you need to start earning your keep.

IT is a huge cost for most companies, but I’ve seen few who even attempt to justify the value of what is spent. Compare and contrast that with the Marketing department. They at least try to measure the effect of dropping 50 large on a Twitter campaign. It might not work, but they try.

In most companies, IT is just a massive black hole that swallows insane amounts of money. And what do customers get back? “We will be unable to meet the timeframes for the next iteration of the account code management system because the alpha-wave interference caused by the oscillations of super-frob have caused everyone to stop reading your email by now and start daydreaming about how much I’d love to get rid of these pointless weenies who keep stopping us from getting things done!”

How do you justify your existence? Oh, they need you? Really? I’ll bet they don’t need you nearly as much as the sales department. Or the CEO. Or accounting. Or HR.

You need to start building products and services that your customers want so badly that they’ll fall over themselves trying to give you money. Look at anything Apple makes. Even when it’s got major flaws they still sell millions of them. Do any of your customers love you like that?

You need to start thinking about profit and loss, and to stop doing the stupid things that cost more than they make. Still running old hardware and operating systems that went end-of-life five years ago? Windows NT 3.51? Why? “Because the business said so”?

Your customers are paying pennies for something that costs dollars to maintain, so you’re losing something on every transaction but making it up in volume, and you’re complaining that your customers are idiots?

Are you sure you’re cut out for this manager thing after all?

Share and Enjoy:

Posted in Business Management, IT, Marketing, Rant, Sales, Tip.

By Justin Warren

20 July 2010

1 comment

Internal IT: Your Days Are Numbered

Flip Clock Study 007a by flickr://PresleyJesus

Photo by PresleyJesus@flickr.com

There’s a shift going on in IT these days. A movement towards cloud, or utility, computing. It’s still early in the marketing hype cycle, but the underlying ideas aren’t new at all. Let me tell you why.

My job as an infrastructure manager is to provide a computing service for my company. The ‘business’ is not about providing computing services. It’s usually something more prosaic, like moving things around (a transport company), selling some sort of product (a manufacturing company), or maybe providing some sort of service (cleaning windows).

None of those have anything much to do with IT per se. IT is used as an enabler: IT is where all the sales records are stored, customer details, order books, stock lists, all the financials for the company (profit and loss, accounts payable, etc., etc.), HR systems. You can do all of these things without a computer, but computers make it faster and more efficient than manual, paper-based systems… if you’re doing it right.

Then there are more IT related services that the business uses: websites, email, Twitter marketing, connections to electronic banking facilities. These don’t really have manual or paper replacements, and they’re more IT centric, but the technology isn’t the main point. Again, these things enable the business to sell more products, service more customers, and make more money.

None of this should be news to you.

Your Competition

If you’re a manager in the IT division within your company, you may think you have no competition. You’re a monopoly, and the business have to come to you when they want another server, or more storage, or a new website or application. They don’t have a choice, right?

Wrong.

Your competition as an IT manager is every single cloud service out there, plus all the outsourcers. Gmail. SalesForce.com. CSC, EDS/HP Consulting, IBM. They all want to take over the job of providing computing services to the business users who currently ‘have’ to use yours. If you do a crap enough job, that’s exactly what will happen.

The outsourcing binge of last decade was a manifestation of that. Business units, fed up with bad service and worse response times, figured that buying IT from a company that did IT as their main business had to be better. These companies dutifully told your business people that they could do your job better and cheaper.

It’s widely believed that outsourcing didn’t work in most cases. I disagree. A lot of things were badly handled, true, but that’s because the wrong things were outsourced. When the right things were outsourced, they stayed there, and companies continue to enjoy the better service and lower costs.

Business units have learned from their mistakes, or the mistakes of others, and this time they’re not going to outsource servers and networks. They’ll outsource the service they need done.

Sales team sick of the buggy, outdated, unstable CRM system you’ve taken 8 months to upgrade (with constant project slippages, outages, and pain)? SalesForce.com. Done.

Internal email sucks? Gmail. Done.

No internal chat application? Everyone’s already using GTalk, or AIM, or Twitter, or Facebook to get around you. IT Security is in the way.

It has never been easier for a business unit to take their computing needs away from internal IT and give their money to an external vendor. Yes, there are risks, but the business people don’t care as much about them as you do. They take risks to make money. And maybe they don’t think it’s as risky as you do? Maybe they think it’ll be worth it if they never have to deal with you again.

Thinking that this won’t happen at your company? Guess again.

They Hate You

Business hates IT. It’s full of strange people who speak weird languages about odd things that normal people don’t understand. Money? Easy enough. Products? Tangible, there’s one right now. Easy.

Your explanation for why they can’t have a new website next week? Unfathomable.

Again, it’s not a new idea that business people are generally frustrated by IT, and only tolerate you because they believe they have to have IT. You’re a cost centre, nothing more.

And if they believed they could replace you tomorrow with something better, what’s stopping them?

It’s IT’s Fault

If I was running IBM’s outsourcing division, and I lost a few big customers, would my managers blame my customers? Or me?

“They had totally unrealistic expectations! They wouldn’t give us the budget we needed! They just don’t understand us.”

I’m sorry?

If your business users, i.e. your customers, don’t like the service they’re getting, it’s your job to fix it. Sure, customers can be wrong sometimes. But if the business was about to lose a few major customers, would they sit around blaming the customers for their woes?

Do that, and you rapidly go out of business.

Unrealistic expectations? Who’s setting these expectations? Are you over-promising and under-delivering perhaps?

Not getting the budget I need? That’s like not charging more than cost price for your product. Why are you letting that happen?

They don’t understand us? I don’t understand how LCD televisions work, but I can still buy one and be happy with it.

Blaming the business is just finding excuses for your own lack of ability. Hardly the actions of a go-getter like you, are they?

Time For Change

If you want to do well in the IT game, you’re going to have to act more like a business, and less like a loose collection of techno wizards. The business want to buy a service, the same way they buy floorspace in a building, or warehouse space, or insurance. IT is no different, and if you think it is, sorry, you’re deluding yourself.

But it won’t matter, because your customers don’t think IT is different any more, and they’re actively looking for someone to replace you. Right now.

It’s going to take a radically new way of thinking to get you through this. Radical for IT that is, but as it turns out, it’s not actually all that radical an idea after all.

The good news is that the answers are already known.

Stay tuned for my next post, where I’ll share my vision for an IT division run less like a outdated anchor, weighing down the business, and more like a dynamic source of business value that the business will want to pay for.