Welcome to this edition of  Practical IT Manager Tips Newsletter.

This week's article
Lower paid employees can help or hurt your IT Organization
There are two types of IT employees who traditionally interface with your clients the most - Desktop Technicians and Help Desk Reps. In many cases, these are your lower paid IT employees, and they can be big boosts for your organization's credibility or they can destroy everything you are trying to do.

Read the article below.

MDE News

IT Manager Institute held for City of Anchorage
A special 3-day IT Manager Institute was held for the IT management team of the City of Anchorage in September.  It was my first trip to Alaska and I was very impressed with the people of Alaska. 

The 3-day program is a great way to pull your management team together and to focus them to use the same management processes and tools. We cover all the material as in the 5-day IT Manager Institute class and give students the opportunity to take the 5-part IT Business Manager Certification exam.

Contact me to schedule an IT Manager Institute for your team in 2007.

18th IT Manager Institute held in Nashville, TN
IT managers come from far and wide to attend the 5-day Institutes we teach in Nashville, and this class was no exception. We host this open class three times a year in Nashville, TN and over 90% come from outside Tennessee, and we usually have managers attend from outside the US. This class included managers from around the US, Guam, and Angola. It was a great class with some real characters which makes for a fun week.

Schedule an IT Manager Institute in your area for 2007
In November, I sit down to start planning my schedule for the following year. We are expanding our reach in 2007. If you have 6 or more IT managers in your company or if you are interested in hosting an open class in your city, contact me to discuss how you can bring the IT Manager Institute to your location.

The complete IT Manager Institute and ITBMC certification program can be taught in 3, 4, or 5-day sessions.

We are specifically interested in the following US cities and countries:

Atlanta, GA
Chicago, IL
Dallas, TX
Denver, CO
Honolulu, HI
Las Vegas, NV
New York, NY
Orlando, FL
Philadelphia, PA
San Francisco, CA
Seattle, WA

Australia
Brazil
Canada
China
England
Japan
Mexico
New Zealand
Saudi Arabia
Scotland
United Arab Emirates

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20 Minute IT Manager - annual subscriptions now available
Many of our subscribers have asked for an annual subscription option for our highly successful 20 Minute IT Manager series. Well, Tom Mochal and I are making it available at a great price of $255.00.

If you expense this educational product to your company like most of our subscribers do, this makes it much simpler. Expense it one time a year and receive excellent insight and management tools on a weekly basis that will be available for review for years to come.

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All new subscribers receive two additional bonus items valued at over $130.00.
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Lower paid employees can help or hurt your IT Organization

Some of your lowest paid IT employees are often the people who have the most contact with your client. Desktop Support Technicians and Help Desk Representatives interface with your clients as much or more than anyone on your staff and they have a direct bearing on the credibility and reputation of your IT organization.

These groups of people can be a tremendous asset to your image or they can be destroying it as you sit here and read this article. Don't get me wrong, your staff probably has the best of intentions and each person may be very conscientious in wanting to do a good job for you. Good intentions, however, do not always make for great results. 

Coach your employees for positive results
It's the little things in client support that make big impacts and it's the consistency of how you do things across your organization that creates great relationships with your client. I tell the managers in my IT Manager Institute that one of the best managers I know is a restaurant owner in Atlanta. George Ippolito coaches his employees every day on the little things that make a big difference with his clients. The result is that his food and service are very consistent across all of his six restaurants.

It's important that we coach and teach our IT employees how to conduct the business of IT support. They may have the very best of intentions, but the reality is that many of them do not know how to conduct themselves in a manner that's going to develop great relationships and trust with your clients.

Let's look at a few examples that can be big saboteurs of developing positive client relationships:

Committing things and forgetting to follow-up  -  Desktop Support Technicians are notorious for this and they do it completely unintentionally. What happens is that while they are working on a problem with one of your client's equipment issues, they see something else that they think should be addressed so they mention this fact to the User and make a promise to take care of it later. Before they get back to their desk, they receive three more calls and forget about what they promised. It's an innocent issue and they have many situations to juggle on a daily basis. The problem - the client doesn't forget and ultimately sees the issue as something where IT again dropped the ball and failed to follow-up. The employee's good work ends up having a sour taste for the client.

Strong follow-up to any commitment to a client is essential for IT credibility, so coach your employees and be sure they understand the importance follow-up has in supporting clients..

Generalizing issues and failing to identify the real issues
Many of us have the tendency to do this, especially with difficult clients who like to "beat us up". To resolve client issues, you have to know what the specific issues are and quantify them, get the client to agree, and build a plan that will positively address the issues. Many of your IT employees may lack the skill or know-how to be able to get underneath the fluff and to the real issue. Diagnosing problems is an art and something you may need to teach your employees how to do.

Failing to do what you say you will do
I mentioned the problem in failing to follow-up. Another big problem in our IT world is that we have a terrible reputation of not delivering what we say we will do. With over 70% failure rate in IT projects, it's a really bad situation we put ourselves into. To gain credibility with our clients, we have to be able to deliver projects successfully. Coach your employees to manage their support activities with a project management mindset and deliver what they say they will do, even if it means working extra hours to make it happen. Commitments to clients are to be taken seriously; otherwise, our clients don't take us seriously.

Talking down to clients
Our people generally do not intend to do this but the reality is that we often come across to the client as arrogant and people who believe we are smarter than they are. Again, it's not usually the reality of the situation but because we speak a different language in IT (lots of acronyms, etc.) and our clients do not understand the technology to the level we do, it can be intimidating to them when we ask technical questions as we try to support their technology. Make your employees aware that it's frustrating when a client has to call us for help and that they do not and should not understand the technology to the level we do. Our goal is to be viewed as very supportive and not condescending or impolite as we support their business.

Poor quality
Your employees who get the reputation of breaking things as they go about fixing something else will have tremendous difficulty in establishing credibility. If you have one or two of these in your staff, that's how the client will view the entire IT organization. Poor quality is a cultural thing so you have to teach your employees how to do their job in a high quality, yet productive manner. Put controls and processes in place to help your employees do a better job. Make quality a high priority in their Performance Plan and you will see improvement as long as you hold them accountable for their performance.

Time management
One of the big issues with our support staff is that they may not yet know how to manage their time effectively. Remember, many of these employees are probably young and relatively inexperienced. To be able to deliver what you say you will do requires a certain amount of conservatism in what you commit to. In technology, one of the things that happens consistently is that projects and work to resolve technical issues almost always takes longer than you think. Because of this dynamic, we often overload our ability to complete all that we have committed to. Help your employees and yourself by teaching them how to manage their time and commitments better by learning how to estimate time and to be conservative and realistic.

Trying to help the client
No, I haven't lost my mind. Sometimes, we call this scope creep. Many times our employees will work on a project and in discussing issues with the client will identify additional things that would be nice for the client to have. The fact is that these items may be beneficial but when working on a project or when your capacity is fully absorbed with assignments, it may not be the proper thing for the employee to do to be creating more work. I'm not advocating we stifle our employees to the extent they don't look for ways to help the client. In fact, I'm a big proponent of this; but not at the expense of failing to get our primary support mission accomplished successfully. Our own people are the biggest causes of scope creep, not the client. Managing our own expectations is often the first step in managing the client's expectations.

Invest in your lower paid employees and develop their soft skills as well as their technical skills. Remember, when we have a great relationship with our clients we can make a lot of mistakes because they will cut us some slack. If we do not develop a strong bond with the client, any mistake will be blown out of proportion and used to justify their concern about us. Our employees who come into contact with our clients frequently can make or break our IT organization's credibility so pay close attention to this area of your business.

Best of success.
Mike Sisco, ITBMC

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