Excellence in It:. Warren C. Zabloudil

bad decision and got lucky. The next time he jumps, he faces the same tall odds of disaster. The same goes for any tech who rushes into a job without suitable preparation. If fact, pity the tech whose boss is so impressed with his lack of restraint that he’s now expected to get jobs done ‘on the quick’ every time. That’s no different than expecting the guy who jumped off the roof to keep doing it over and over again on a regular basis. After all, it worked out fine the first time. If you’re professional enough to want the job done right instead of just quickly, the fact is you were correct in your restraint. Your boss, who was cutting corners, is only inviting trouble down the road for the whole department.

      Doing things without proper preparation will always cost the company extra money in the long run. The inevitable mistakes that kind of work ethic brings will cause more downtime and delays in worse ways than taking time to properly prepare ever will. If you find yourself in this situation, remember your boss made a bad decision based on the needs of the moment and you made a good decision based on your long-term professionalism. Don’t ever doubt yourself in this regard, no matter how much it may sting your self-esteem at the moment. In fact, it’s even reasonable to think that if the boss had planned things better from the start the current rushed situation wouldn’t have happened.

      Good preparation means understanding all aspects of the job at hand. This includes end-user requirements, the technology involved, the milestones to be managed, the risks during implementation, and the abilities of those who are assisting you. The more you can lay down a clear path to follow in terms of rolling a system into production, the more courage you’ll have from the beginning and the more confidence you’ll maintain along the way. Good preparation leads to courage, courage invites confidence, and confidence leads to success.

      Once you understand the technology enough to proceed with a reasonable amount of comfort, the next step is to measure all the variables. These can include such things as cost, workload, time, risks, workmanship, and user orientation. The combination of variables is different with every job and you must work through them all to determine their importance in each case. Confidence can be gained by understanding how much focus each variable deserves relative to its impact on that particular job. This is because understanding something in detail helps diminish the element of surprise and, as has been proven over and over again, surprise is the one thing that can never exist in the world of IT.

      Being able to understand all the variables in depth for each job is something that comes through experience. It’s never a quick task. You must take care to understand as much as possible about how to proceed on a job before you start to work. Never think that you’ll figure things out as you go. Planning to “cross that bridge when you get to it” doesn’t work in IT. Presume nothing and prepare for everything. If you still get tripped up along the way, you’ll at least be able to recover rapidly and get things back on track with less effort.

      The variables that can cause you to stumble during your work are measured as risk. Risk comes in so many shapes and sizes you may not even realize it’s even there until too late. It could be a loss of funding caused by a previously unannounced change in corporate structure, a component stuck on backorder with a vendor, a team member overstating their skill-sets, or a large end-user group struggling to find time for proper orientation once the new system is successfully built. Risk can come at you from every angle and at any time along the way. Being burnt by unknown risks can dampen your courage for future jobs and hurt your confidence while finishing the one at hand.

      It takes imagination to understand risk. The more ways you can imagine how things can go wrong, the more prepared you’ll be before you start. Minimizing risk is the same as minimizing surprise. Don’t let yourself be surprised by anything as you move forward. It’s not good enough to try to merely anticipate risk. You must fully understand and eliminate as much risk as you possibly can before you begin. An IT project must not be an adventure into the unknown. There can be no unseen elements hiding around unforeseen corners waiting to trip you up. You must anticipate where all those corners are and what elements of risk they might conceal before you begin.

      Nothing gives you more courage than knowing how something will turn out before you start. One of the nicest things about the IT world is that you get to work on things you control from the beginning. After all, those systems didn’t fall from the sky. They were built either by you or someone like you. As such, you have the power of God over what goes on inside them. If you don’t fully understand them, don’t start working on the job until you do. If deadlines that don’t allow time for understanding were irresponsibly assigned by management, then convince management more time is needed. Running head-on into a fail-state that could have been foreseen with a reasonable amount of preparation can cripple a company and break morale. No matter how big the hurry, unforeseen risk can easily end up costing more in the long run than using an appropriate, evaluative approach.

      You gain more credibility from a successful job than from a failed one, no matter how heroic your efforts were. In IT, you have the opportunity to foresee the future, at least as far as any particular job is concerned, so don’t waste it. Take the opportunity to under-stand all the elements that can go wrong before you begin so you can move forward with all the confidence in the world. You can predict all events and vanquish all worries ahead of time if you put in the effort to do so.

      Bigger jobs may also have more than one deadline. Understanding how risk affects each of those deadlines (or milestones) is a critical part of performing any job well. If the job is multifaceted, then not meeting a particular milestone can be more than just a scheduling hassle. The entire proverbial assembly line can be stopped if one of those milestones is missed. That means even the possibility of a missed milestone here or there is just one more thing that needs to be accounted for in the planning stages. It’s especially true if the deadlines were poorly thought out by the staff member who assigned them. The best thing about moving from milestone to milestone is that it gives you a clear line-of-sight path to the next endpoint. If you break even the most unreasonable deadline into manageable steps, you can work your way through it with less effort than if you had simply dived in and hoped for the best. Most importantly, you’ll reduce the element of surprise while working to get the job done.

      Risk loves things like rush jobs and short deadlines. Those are its easiest targets. Just as water always follows the path of least resistance, risk always follows the path of least preparedness. An important skill-set you should develop is the ability to understand how to manage the risk of those occasional short deadlines. If you get a short notice job and you understand the accompanying importance and the risk involved, the first course of action you must take is the preemptive act of building up the courage to request some game rules as soon as you can, even if nothing particular has been assigned my management yet. Rule number one is that is that you’ll always be given a reasonable amount of time to develop a workable plan for any new job. Rule number two is that you won’t be thrown into a job cold with no skill-sets for the solution you’ll be working on.

      Usually these game rules can be a simple request to your boss. Bosses with any IT sense will appreciate your forethought and probably have a pretty strong idea of what you’re requesting based on their own experience. Confidence, as well as courage, can also be handed to you through good management too. If you have a lousy boss who doesn’t get it, the best you can hope for is good luck with the jobs you’re assigned as you struggle to mitigate risk more effectively. In some cases, it’s not unreasonable for you to consider mustering what little confidence you have left and use it to find employment elsewhere; after all, your ability to maintain your professionalism must always come first throughout your entire career.

      Keep in mind that even the worst bosses can’t hide for long from the high employee turnover rate they cause. Turnover rates cost the company money by making it difficult for the IT department to operate efficiently. The hard truth about IT is that no department can cut more deeply into a company’s bottom line than Information Technology does. IT is always considered overhead; even in companies that sell IT services. IT doesn’t generate a single penny of profit for any company, its true value can only measured by how cost efficiently it can support billable minutes for the rest of the organization. All computer related inefficiencies will eventually cause the company to lose billable minutes and suffer increased overhead. No matter how politically connected the bad IT boss may be,