Blade Watch

I was interviewing a Senior IT Manager who has up until recently been completing a business transformation project, his role was to simply improve IT delivery, fix the budgets and get IT back on track, I asked him to summarize five key issues that prevented delivery:

• Olden days thinking – that’s not how we do things around here
• Internal politics – sorry the helpdesk has to be run from Ohio, Arthur likes Ohio – but we can’t necessarily change the world
• Support models and strategy that isn’t business as usual – do we stay as we are? The concept of economic value against investment
• Effective teams working as a team and sorting out the workflows – Mike builds servers, Percy does the labels and dns, Sally does printing
• The challenges resulting from cost transparency, making everyone pay their true cost and making it affordable, preventing the cost center mentality – the concept of the greater good.

Related to that, I asked, what’s one thing you know causes an issue?
The management team focussed on the nuts and bolts, failing to articulate their message, what it is they want and expect, coupled with civility to their teams.

I’ll give you an example; if the CIO, (the IT management team) isn’t actively involved in the support objectives, why should the individual teams? Only by reading the morning reports and admittedly it might be randomly once a week did I get a sense of:

• What applications/elements of the infrastructure are causing us grief  – what needed targetted investment to improve service and value to the business
• How the teams work together – which teams always answer instantly, and who gets back when they can be bothered irrespective of the businesses/teams involved
• What it is we have in production – it’s only when the 2.1GB drive fails on our server that I ask why in the world, do we have an x86 server with a 2.1GB drive? Why is it not virtualized and who do I speak to fix it?

Once we had these kind of issues for analysis and resolution, we could then make quick wins, transform our end user perception, make life easier for our teams and reduce our operating costs.

A perfect example was in the first month when I started at my last role, when looking a the weekly call out report it showed an engineer getting called over three nights for three servers showing an error for the Compaq Version Control Agent. It’s only when I spoke to the Wintel manager and asked:

1. Do we use the Compaq Version Control Agent – answer “it’s installed but we don’t use it”

2. Why do we monitor the Compaq Version Control Agent status – answer, “we don’t know it’s the default monitoring setup on all the servers”

Why oh why, am I paying for an operator to receive this alert, page an engineer who says – “don’t worry about it, we don’t use it”

Related posts:

1. Three ways to benchmark IT delivery I got the chance to meet with an IT Director...
2. How to benchmark IT delivery part 2 The IT directors’ replies were as follows: Time taken to...
3. Is my disk/array rebuilding on DL380? I got an email from Mike asking about his Compaq...
4. Are you Cisco, VMware and Citrix certified – no are you? What skills do you want from an engineer? Mike (that’s...
5. Check ILO version remotely Another tweet, can you check the ILO version remotely on...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.