Killer Sysadmins and Their Pugs

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IT professionals are worth their weight in gold. The trouble is that this is an area in which nonprofit organizations typically lack capital, personnel and training. I have some suggestions on how to make due.

1. Audit. Figure out what you have, what everybody uses, what works well (or doesn’t), and what people wish they had. It is important to be realistic, but let staff list whatever they like.

2. Group meeting. Invite everybody but don’t make it mandatory. Those not invested in making things better won’t show. The ones to form your IT team will be there, as will those whose buy-in you will need. At the meeting, lay out the results of the audit. Maybe not everybody knows marketing has a laptop. Maybe nobody knows you’re not on an exchange server (or what that means). But everyone will be happy to know that everybody else hates the email system too, or that everybody really wants remote access. Use this meeting to set priorities. How democratic you want to be depends on corporate culture, but get buy-in from everyone and tell them you’ll put prices to everything and will meet with them all again in a week or whatever, but make it quick.

3. Come to Jesus meeting. Again, invite everyone but not mandatory meeting. Those who wanted to bitch will have had their turn, those who weren’t engaged may see that you’re serious and turn up. With numbers in hand, time to lay out the costs associated with the priorities of the last meeting. Now is the time to speak with authority (or beg one to come in as a favor) about the IT structure of the company, it’s needs, and the financial realities of fixing things. Then ask what the staff wants to do. You have to do this honestly. I suggest the final priorities must be made by the group as a whole. You will need company-wide buy-in to achieve meaningful change. My hope would be that you would choose one priority that could be achieved with existing resources, and one that would make meaningful change if resources could be found. This could give you an fast, early win, and an aspirational goal on which staff could focus.

4. Establish a Power User Group. My last IT Director called them “pugs”. This is a workgroup from all areas of the company (one from each) that will oversee, in the absence of an IT staffer, the IT priorities of the company. PUGS are charged with taking their department’s needs to the meeting, and collaborating with all the other PUGS to achieve the priorities. Give this group autonomy to act within a budget and timeframe and have them report directly to the highest level of operational oversight, not through another department.

5. Set and maintain an IT budget. It may be modest at first, but make it a line item, stick to it, and make it a funding priority that cannot be cut any easier than benefits. Just like benefits, consider good IT necessary to attract and retain good talent. Just like paying the rent, consider IT needs critical to operations.

Beyond this, tactics vary. You might outsource. If so, have the PUGS oversee the bidding and the vendor. You might hire IT staff. If so, you are very fortunate and now have someone to oversee the PUGS. Don’t hire someone who can’t or won’t. You might have to make due with the Frankenstein of a system you have, but if so, you will have gone through the necessary steps to establish priorities and buy-in from the key staff, and created a staff-led oversight body to manage your monster.

Rub my belly and I'll reboot your router

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How To Dismantle A Silo

Dismantling Silos Starts At the Top

Improve organizational performance by dismantling the normal silos that occur. Here’s some thoughts on how.

1. Start from the top down. Get your silo bosses together and explain the problem. They didn’t get to where they are by being stupid (hopefully), so a well-placed “for instance” or HBR article on the subject should do the trick.

2. Tie management reviews to collaboration. Make at least one goal of each manager dependent on performance by another silo.

3. Open up yourself. Start from the position that everyone needs to know everything. Short of compensation packages, I think that in a mission-driven organization, the entire staff should be privvy to pretty much everything. Concerned about leaks? Improve your staff handbook and confidentiality clauses. I have found it far easier to manage informed staff.

4. Cross-train. This too, should come from the top down. What are the critical functions of each silo? Make silo managers make a list. Exchange lists. Pick and item from someone else’s list. Learn how to do it. Good for emergencies, too.

5. Focus on Best Practice. As a senior executive hopefully you are doing this regularly as part of a best practices regime, but if not, now is a good time to see what works best in one silo and see if it can be adapted in another. Focus not on why it won’t work here, and rather on why does it work over there and does this silo have shared desired outcome?

6. Cross Pollinate. Take talented junior staffers and loan them out to another silo for some set period of time. During that time they have all their same duties, but they must attend the other silo’s meetings, and not their own. See how quickly information can travel across silos to get the job done. There are variations on this move, which is having them attend both silo meetings, having them report back to their home silo. One might also consider some job swapping, or task swapping. I might write a separate post just on this.

7. Joint meetings based on coroprate outcomes. Create a workgroup of select employees from many silos. Focus intensely on an organizational need. Set a time limit. Base performance review on collaboration and joint responsibility for outcomes.

8. Share the Love. Meet as a group. Share praise for outcomes, collaboration, shared processes, and all the outcomes of the suggestions above. If you want silos torn down, support for this must come from the top and must be expressed publicly as praise for employees that walk the walk.

I’d love to hear examples of how this works from your personal experience.

Effective Meetings

# of staff * hrly rate * mtg length = ???

There is much to learn from mistakes, and I’ve learned how to run a good meeting because of how many bad ones I’ve run. Here are some things I’ve learned about how to run an effective meeting.

1. Set an agenda, stick to it, and send it out in advance.

2. Don’t make it about reports, make it about the reports that don’t happen. As a manager, you need to be at the nexus of information, and often you will see where the gaps are. You’ll hear that marketing is running behind on graphic design, which might be good for sponsorship to know, as they need more time to close a deal. Besides, those staffers who care, make themselves aware, and you’ll be wasting the time of your best people if you simply ‘report out’.

3. Make sure there’s a reason for everybody to be there. If IT will have little to do with the issue, give them a pass. I never tell them not to come, but give them a heads up to option out. Don’t waste people’s time. Also, you may find that the matter at hand is really a ‘two hander’ requiring a much shorter and much smaller meeting.

4. Assign someone to take notes. A junior staffer who you want to cultivate into leadership is ideal. They’ll likely hang back in the debate unless they have something important to add, will maybe like the opportunity to be in the meeting, and will quite frankly, take better notes. BTW, the notes go to everybody immediately after the meeting, after the leader vetts them. This sets the agenda with action items to cover before the next meeting.

5. Carve out micro-meetings at the end of the agenda. This one I took from Marissa Mayer at Google. If an item comes up during the meeting, or came up anytime really, but can be addressed by a subset of the room fairly quickly, kick it to the end of the agenda. This is the “Bill, can I see you for a minute” meeting without the stigma of getting called to the principal’s office. This micro meeting section is where you can resolve issues quickly, fairly, and in a timely fashion, rather than setting an entirely new meeting.

To these five rules I’ll add one more: Mind the clock. If you’ve set a time period for the meeting, stick to it. Personally, I have a one-hour guarantee. If you can’t get through your agenda in an hour, then there’s too much on it. Sticking to the clock, which means starting on time and ending on time shows respect to those attending, keeps the group focused, and gives you the hammer you need to cut off ramblers, prevaricators, dissemblers, politicians, and to engage the unengaged. I mean, really, if you can’t lead a meeting for and hour and keep your staff engaged, how are you going to do it day in, day out? Alternately, if your staff can’t keep it together for an hour, a little heart-to-heart might be in order.

But don’t make that a meeting, try coffee instead.

Management via “The Middle Way”

Source: Lifehacker

I have for some time studied Taoism, which in my interpretation means doing a fair amount of “going with the flow” and doing the right things at the right time.

There is a temptation to treat your personal and business life as a seamless whole. Franklin Covey attacks this problem from a top down method: figure out your strengths and work a plan to achieve your ultimate goal. Another method, described by a writer at D*I*Y Planner is the “bottom up method” of what I call “Git ‘Er Done”, which is sort of like that old system of never handling a piece of paper more than once.

The trouble I have is that I can spend forever trying to figure out my strengths and mission in life, and/or lose complete focus on what the ultimate goal is while trying to prioritize some actions called for in the “Git ‘Er Done” method.

I’ve not had luck putting together a Taoist management tool, but this “Middle Way” seems to hold some promise:

1. Determine your mission. Why were you put on this planet at this time?

2. Establish your vision. Where do you want to be when this period of your life is all over? Note that I’m not talking about your whole damned life, just the part you can see right now. That might be five years or fifteen, or one. I like to think of this as my next achievement. What can I feel pride in next, what does that look like?

3. Figure out what roles you have to play in your life. Father, Son, Husband, Friend, Employee, Boss.

4. How do each of these roles fit your vision and how can they help you THIS WEEK. Some weeks you might have to put some of those roles on hold, while others get the bulk of the attention. I’m assuming your vision didn’t include you alienating your friends and family in pursuit of your vision. Set a goal for each role, which may be as simple as “don’t piss off so-and-so because you’re spending all your time this week on X”. Come to think of it, that might not be simple.

5. Rank it by importance. That’s subjective and there’s no advice I can give you on that. Be Flexible.

6. Break down the week into action items necessary to achieve each goal, and number them, assigning dates, work time allotted, and any check points along the way. Best get the most important stuff out of the way as soon as possible, or your Friday is really going to suck. Just sayin’…

7. Review daily.

Now how to deal with stuff that happens each day. Deal with it as the flow of work allows. For instance, everybody has a down time, a mid-afternoon lull, or what have you. Do it then. Flexibility is strength.

I try to hold in my mind an image of my daughter crawling across the floor to my wife/her mother during a family gifting party (I forget what it was, birthday, Christmas, baby-shower). She had a plan and an objective. As she crawled over obstacles or had things soft and fuzzy presented to her, she dealt with them quickly and happily but never stopped her forward progress.

The plan exists to help you deal with the things that you cannot plan for. If you know what you want, where you are going, and what must be done to get there, then you can deal with the unexpected. If you lack a plan to begin with, then any small thing can throw you into disarray.

The plan is the net to manage the day-to-day. With the net, you can catch many fish, and let the uninportant pass through. Without a net, it is anarchy, as you lunge from one flash to the next.

 

Author’s note: My interpretation of the Tao is worthless. “Pride yourself and you will not endure.” says Lao Tzu, and so I take no pride in either authorship, insight, nor advice. If you find my thoughts helpful, it is entirely as a result of your insight, not my words.

Image: Ramesh Jhawar, Chinese Fishing Nets, Watercolor on paper, 2010. Link Here

Reading is Fundamental

I need help teaching my son his abc and sounds so we can work on reading. Whatever they are doing at school and whatever I’m doing so far ain’t working. Tonight I lost my patience. We are looking at a book he likes called Mr Muddle. I’m trying to get him to sound out the name, because he can’t remember it. What’s the first letter? M. What sound does M make? Mmmmmm. What’s next? W. No, a W has two scoops, that’s why it’s called a double-u. Double means two. So if it has two of them and is called a double-u, what do you think just one if them is called? (silence) It’s the letter U, buddy. Ok, so what sounds does the letter U make. Ooooo. That’s right and also uhhh, like in uhhhmbrella. So let’s do the first two letters. M says what? Mmmm. Good and this U says uhhhh. Now say it after me: mmmm, uhhhh, mmm, uhhh. Good. What’s next? D, two d’s daddy. That’s right and what sound do the D’s make in daddy? Duh. That’s right, duh. So now we’ve got mmmm, uhhhh, duhhh. Say it with me. Mmm, uhh, duhh, mmm, uhh, duhh. Faster: mmm, uhh, duhh, mmm, uhh, duhh. Now what does that sound like when you say it really fast? M-U-\\Mr. Mixed-up!? What? No, it can’t be mr. Mi… Because we have a U in there, saying uhhh…Mr. Mixy! Mr. Mix-me-up! Mr…son we have to..Mr. Mimi! Son, we need…Mr. Mini Mimi!
Dad loses shit.
Tears.
Dad feels like shit.

Help?

Arts Innovation

The claim that the performing arts lack innovation in an attempt to please a greying audience is foolish. Those sixty and seventy year olds need another old chestnut like they need another pill to take. They’d sooner fend off telemarketers than see another Tannhauser.

The arts attracted folks because of new work and it keeps them for the same reason. These old folks didn’t just show up that way. They started coming when they were thirty and still want to be treated that way.

To think otherwise is to disrespect a whole generation of patrons. If Michael Kaiser wants to sit in this ivory tower at the Kennedy Center and bemoan the lack of innovation, he has only himself to blame. I suggest he bulk up his travel budget and head west.

Innovation is just over the horizon, Michael, west of the sun, and south of your $60 million straw man.

Blade Runner Umbrella

My first umbrella for my collection has arrived! The “Blade Runner” Umbrella was purchased from ThinkGeek. Here’s the promo copy:

Cross now… cross now….

Early in the 21st Century, the Tyrell Corporation advanced robot evolution into the Nexus phase – a being virtually identical to a human – known as a Replicant. They’re all around you, even now. That guy next to you? He’s a Replicant. How do we know? He’s walking the streets in the rain with no umbrella. That, and he failed the Voight-Kampff.

In the pre-apocalyptic future, the air will be so thick, it will be dark in the middle of the day. Coupled with the almost constant rain, you’ll need to find a way to stay dry and light your way to the noodle shop down the street.

Even if you don’t live in a quasi-futuristic Los Angeles and you aren’t a Blade Runner, you can still have the coolest umbrella on the street. With a push of a button, the shaft lights up, illuminating you and your path. Now, even in the darkest of nights, you’re a lot more visible to the cars on the street, making your long walk home through the rain a lot safer.

At $25 it is about the same as a regular full sized umbrella. I took it out for the first time today in Vancouver’s accommodating rainy weather. I did get a few looks, and the shaft does give off a nice blue glow. Clearly, not as generous as the picture, but then I didn’t expect that. It seems to have an LED in the base of the handle, with silken or narrow white plastic diffusion stings running up the center of a hollow lucite shaft, which extends somewhat beyond the canopy. As expected it is quite bright around the handle, with diminishing candles as the light travels up the shaft. I look forward to trying it at night, when I think the illumination will be more than adequate for the effect desired. Lucky me, I think we have a new moon tonight.

It has a wider than normal shaft, and while not unbreakable, I do notice that it has a noticeable stiffness when held. Of particular note, is a robust opening and closing mechanism which adds to a sense of good construction. Your basic black canopy is a little on the lightweight side, but handles water nicely and is itself reinforced by an extra set of spindles at each vein. I expect it will resist “turn out” from the wind a fair amount better than your normal brolly.

A good, fair deal from ThinkGeek.