Excellence in It:. Warren C. Zabloudil

outcome, the bottom grade "good enough for now" outcome, and several shades in between. It should be obvious what kind of outcome you should strive for if you want to be thought of as an excellent tech. Always remember that from your perspective as an IT professional, the definition of quality doesn’t come from how well the computer system runs when you’re finished working on it; that’s the end-user’s definition of quality. From your perspective, the definition of quality comes from the number of those exquisite details you accounted for while the job was underway. The rest will take care of itself when the job is done. The more granular your focus is at the beginning, the higher quality your output will be in the end.

      If you want to be a real professional, you must always be able to recognize the difference between good work and “good enough” work, even if end-users won’t ever notice it. Professionalism in any line of work is gained more through the practitioner’s ability to understand the smallest details of their craft more than from anything else. No amount of happy talk will ever replace that. Whether it comes from classroom education, hands on experience, or a good resource library, the ability to maintain an accurate focus on the smallest aspects of what you’re working on is what will most define you as being good at what you do. Anything less will just define you as less. It’s the good techs who keep track of all those fine details that will develop the reputation of being excellent.

Clarity

      It can’t be said enough: the best measure of how well you understand anything complicated is how clearly you can explain it to someone who knows nothing about it. This goes double in IT. Few things are more mysterious to end-users than their computers and whatever it is their computers are tied to. The gap between the knowledgeable and the novice can never be underestimated when interacting with end-users. What’s more, the definition of novice can be much broader than the average tech might think.

      If you look at it from the perspective of your daily activities and how they continually create something new in your environment, then anyone, including your boss and your teammates, can be considered a novice, at least with that one thing you’re working on at the moment. Your work in IT affects so many people that you’re more or less required to keep all involved parties abreast of your actions to some extent at all times. This can be a status report to a boss, a quick answer to a teammate, some updates to the helpdesk, or a notice to end-users about something new coming their way. It can also be a reminder given to upper management about why the expense of something new is worthwhile. While technical skills are part of your craft, you should treat communication like an art form because it is really that important.

      The critical thing to remember about practicing the art of com-munication is that while you multi-task multiple-part tasks all day long, you must always communicate about them serially. That means to sticking to only one topic per answer. When you’re giving a status report always follow a linear order and don’t jump from one task to another. While all those multitasks make complete sense in your busy mind, your listener is going to become confused in no time. It’s amazing how difficult it can be for some techs to communicate sensibly when they’re working on a number of different multi-tasked jobs at once. Any status updates they give are basically just a brain dump of barely connected facts.

      To make matters worse, the typical tech is surrounded by other multi-tasking professionals, all giving status updates, asking advice, or anything else that involves describing their ongoing activities. It’s critical that nobody add more than one topic at a time in this situation. It’s hard enough to keep track of your own jobs without trying to follow along with someone else’s jobs being described to you in haphazard order. Clear communication starts with simplicity. The thing to always do when communicating is to find the simplest, yet fully accurate, method for conveying just the information required for the moment and nothing more. Any elaboration should only be used as a last ditch rescue attempt when clarity has failed after a try or two. Even then, it’s critical to be short about it. When elaborating, for whatever reason, remember that if you weren’t clear in the first place, adding a lot of marginally organized detail later on isn’t going to help the listener much. Master the art of saying just enough to be clear, concise, and accurate with your information from the start. It’ll serve you well in the long and make your listeners happier, too.

      The same goes for what you write. Keep written communication short and to the point. It’s easy to get in the habit of putting everything into a single e-mail that leaves nothing uncovered. This can be especially true after spending time with those “but why?” end-users who persistently e-mail questions about things in a level of detail you know they don’t fully understand. As soon as you answer one question, they reply with another that’s equally hard to quickly explain. Pretty soon you have a long thread running down the screen of back and forth “but why” questions and answers.

      Sometimes techs respond to this type of end-user by preemp-tively including a response to every anticipated question in one big “first strike” e-mail that covers every possible detail. Their first strike e-mail usually ends up being a bunch of paragraphs that run on forever. While this’s better than blowing off the overly inquisitive end-user with “JUST BECAUSE” in bold font, it can lead to the bad habit of responding to all e-mails with a first strike format. Don’t let this kind of thing change the way you answer questions in general or you could find yourself putting everything into one big e-mail even when no one is asking for it.

      The irony here is that when the recipient sees all your well-chosen size eleven Calibri font words running down the screen, they may not even bother reading your e-mail in the first place. Nobody likes reading long e-mails in the middle of the day. If you have ever had someone ask you a dumb question just after you explained everything to them in an detailed e-mail, don’t blame them. It’s not their fault if your e-mails are too long to read. It’s best to keep to short answers and avoid the long novels. While you’re at it, break your e-mail up into small blocks too. Put an extra line feed in every now and then. Even when a paragraph is relatively short, it can still look too long to read if it’s a single block of text. Remember to never be a hassle. You’re not the only one who gets tired of reading e-mails all day long. Add a little extra formatting to make your communication easier to read. Your recipients will appreciate it.

      Good communication skills don’t only apply when interacting with others; they’re also important when communicating with yourself. This isn’t meant to be trite. Being truthful with yourself makes a big difference in how good a tech you’ll end up being over time. This isn’t about being hard on yourself: self-honesty has nothing to do with marginalizing your own self confidence. However, being able to communicate truthfully with yourself means understanding your limitations in both knowledge and time management. All the knowledge in the world won’t help much if you never have time to use it. On the other hand, having only a few skills-sets but a lot of time to figure things out may seem nice, but you won’t be getting much done. The bottom line is; being truthful with yourself will help you make better decisions about the jobs you’re working on.

      This particularly applies to knowing when a job is truly done. This is one of the hardest lessons for techs to learn and is the biggest failing of rookie IT professionals. For example, stress can create a deep desire to just tip-toe away from a quick fix in the hope that the problem won’t pop back up the moment you leave the area. Or a tough time management issue might have you running off to the next job before the current task is really finished. Sometimes less experienced techs don’t know enough about what’s being worked on to feel comfortable with sticking around to confirm that the work they implement will take in the long term. As every tech eventually learns, calling a job done too early will lead to repeat visits to work on the same issue down the road. The worst side effect of this is the end-users will eventually start to question your abilities.

      Learn to deal with this situation by communicating with yourself well. First, listen to that frustrated voice in your head that tells you that this time you really will crack down and study what’s needed to be proficient on the systems you’re responsible for. When you ignore that voice, you’re ignoring common sense. Get to know that voice and understand what it sounds like. If you want to claim a good level of street smarts on the job, it’s your common sense that’ll give them to you. Ignore common sense and you could find yourself both miserable and unreliable.