How To Win At IT
posted by John Spacey, December 16, 2012Your IT department needs help.
Projects are failing, your business isn't happy and your team isn't getting much respect despite all your efforts.
You'd like IT to be a trusted partner of your business. You'd like every project to be a successful and rewarding experience.
If any of this sounds familiar, these 6 habits will help you get there.
1. Deliver often
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.The primary reason for IT project failure is complexity. The surest way to reduce that complexity is to break projects into phases.
~ Alan Perlis
This isn't exactly news. The dangers of big bang implementations are well understood. Nevertheless, projects still tend to be delivered in large phases that are far too complex.
Break projects into small phases and deliver often. Look for quick wins and incremental improvements. Ideally, you should never deliver something that takes more than a month.
2. Investigate alternatives
If you look at the history of big obstacles in understanding our world, there's usually an intuitive assumption underlying them that's wrong.Assumptions are dangerous. For example, a project may start with the assumption that a SOA architecture is required without investigating alternatives.
~ Jeff Hawkins
Begin every initiative by considering the widest possible alternatives. Challenging assumptions (including your own) yields big dividends.
3. Look at the big picture
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.It's important to think about the social, political, economic and technical context of our work as IT professionals. For example, it's important to understand the legal and ethical implications of information privacy.
~ Alan Watts
4. Understand your business
If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 MPG.The importance of information technology to business results has increased steadily for the past 40 years. Where IT was once a small department that drove limited automation, IT is now key to business execution and decision support.
~ Bill Gates
The demand for business savvy IT professionals has increased dramatically as technology becomes fundamental to business models across all industries.
Understand your business and you'll do well.
5. Become a useful generalist
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.The animal kingdom has generalist and specialist species. Generalist species can survive in a wide range of environments. Specialists require particular conditions for survival.
Charles Darwin
The giant panda is a specialist. Its diet is 99% bamboo. It's also quite picky about bamboo.
It costs the average zoo around $1 million (USD) to feed a giant panda for a year. Giant pandas need special bamboo sent fresh daily by express international shipping.
The raccoon is a generalist that eats berries, insects, eggs and small animals. Raccoons are also fans of human food they find in garbage bins. The raccoon is found all over North America and Central America.
Most IT professionals begin their careers as specialists of some type. Moving towards generalization is key to your professional progress. It makes you more adaptable to a wide range of business environments and challenges.
Being an generalist doesn't mean that you're hands off. It means that you have a wide range of skills. Their are thousands of roles you're able to play in an organization.
6. Cut through jargon, speak plainly and candidly
Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.It's difficult to underestimate the impact effective communication can have for your IT career.
~ David Ogilvy, often credited as the father of modern advertising
The IT industry is surrounded in widely misunderstood jargon. Communicate with short, memorable messages in plain language. Your colleagues will learn to appreciate you.
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