Excellence in It:. Warren C. Zabloudil

doable in a professional manner. Professionalism comes first, all else follows that.

      Even with masterful skills you can find yourself in trouble if you try to do too much at once. It’s important to know when your extensible reach is at its limits. Do this by honestly taking an assessment of how complete your ‘finished’ jobs really are. After all, fixing a tricky bug isn’t as easy as changing a tire on a car. Finished and complete don’t necessarily mean the same thing in a world where the solutions are often virtual. For the sake of your own long term sanity, you must always resist the impulse to call a job done before it really is. That means get all tasks completely finished by everyone’s measure and not just your own.

      Leaving incomplete jobs for others to clean up will give you a reputation as the kind of tech who can’t be trusted to work on their own. Having someone follow behind you on a regular basis to check your work is no way to achieve a reputation for excellence. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’ll find time to make corrections later either. That’s just wishful thinking. The fact is there’ll always be more jobs later on that’ll take your future time and effort to complete. If you can’t get each one completed when you have the chance, you probably won’t have time to come back later to finish up. If you reach a point where this’s how your workload feels, it’s time to slow down and take stock of your situation.

      Remind yourself that your professionalism is at stake and that your work ethic should never be compromised. Not doing a 100% job because you think non-techies won’t notice your short-cuts is a poor way to work. The discipline that all techs share requires a standard of excellence that can be hard to maintain but is too important to let slide. Company employees who don’t know anything about computers are depending on you to lead the way. Don’t short change them. Know your scope and don’t go beyond your limits until you’re ready to move on to the next level.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Bad Habits

      No matter how life-defining a career may be, it often follows a less glamorous path than the one dreamed of in childhood. A person can aspire to be a doctor but leave medical school to end up in advertising. Another can learn to work on fast cars from a favorite uncle only to become a school teacher instead of a famous race car driver. Still another might join the army for a temporary stint fresh out of high school and end up retiring decades later as a gray haired officer with a great military legacy. Any path that a person stumbles on can become a life calling, even if it was never their original intention.

      This’s how it has always been. So it’s not surprising that some people don’t care as much as they should about the quality of work they do. They show up at their place of employment and sit in their cubicle, stand at their station, walk their beat, or whatever, and move through their day one minute after the next, never giving any thought to how they can improve their performance or how their performance affects others around them.

      As a computer professional you can never fall into that mindset, even if you never dreamed of working with computers when you were a kid. It’s an old adage that there’s no such thing as a bad job, only jobs that are badly done. Certainly the IT world is full of badly done jobs. Some IT service providers seem to be getting more adept at disappointing their customers every day. People regularly complain that calls to customer service mean confusing voice menus, long hold times, inconsiderate staff, marginal repairs, and so on. Nevertheless, just because badly done jobs seem to exist all around you, it’s no excuse for you to allow poor performance to become part of your career too.

      Something you should keep in mind is that great buildings are never built by as many people as they eventually occupy. A few well motivated people can make a big difference in the lives of a much bigger group of people around them. It’s an important truth that anyone who rises a bit higher in their daily job can help raise their co-workers’ efforts a bit too. In any economy, old or new, every little bit helps. The idea is to accept the career path you’re on (even if it wasn’t your original choice) and stay true to it by rising to the calling it presents, even if others around you haven’t. This’s where the approach you take when working on computers starts to matter.

      As an IT tech, you have a workplace impact that extends far beyond your desk. How well you do your job affects the lives of all the people working around you. Being a tech is not an assembly line kind of job where you only affect a small part of a whole. You can directly impact the careers of everyone else in your company by how well (or how badly) you handle your own career. Everything you design, everything you build, everything you maintain and upgrade…in fact, virtually everything you touch in your working environment…will be used by everyone else in your company to earn their living. This is not a small responsibility.

      Your coworkers’ ability to make their mortgage payments, their car payments, their kid’s tuition payments, and even get that oh-so-rare Christmas bonus, can be immediately impacted by how well you do your job in the IT department. If you’ve ended up choosing to work on computers for a career, what you’ve really chosen is to help provide and maintain a large part of the foundation on which the world operates. Sure this may seem an overstatement at first glance, but it’s the flat truth. You must never forget that how well you do your job in IT on a daily basis determines how well your coworkers will be able to do their jobs on a daily basis too.

      Unfortunately, experience is beginning to show that a few sloppy computer techs might be finding employment in the ranks. It sounds cranky and cynical coming from an old tech…and yes, this’s only the opinion of one person…but in a world where virtually everything is done on computers nowadays, marginal computer support really does cause many people to suffer. The world of IT should never be taken lightly and there’s a no greater sign of a marginally conceived or executed solution than the struggles of the end-users using it.

      People who work on computers all day long get to know them on a personal level. Every little glitch, each sticky part, and anything slow will be noticeable and remembered. The company’s employees should be able to remain focused on the work they’re doing and not on the tools they’re doing it with. Any small operational defect will slowly build into a major source of frustration, or worse, into invisible operational overhead that costs the company in ways that management can’t easily see. As a computer tech, you really do have this much impact on the life of everyone around you.

      Before covering the characteristics that’ll lead you on a path to achieving excellence in your job, it may help to first outline the common characteristics that lead to something less. There are many types of bad behavior in the IT world, but nine in particular seem to be the most prevalent. If you find yourself developing one of these nine characteristics in your daily work ethic, you should look in the mirror the very next morning and think hard about ways you can become better at what you do for a living.

      The Nine Bad Tech Types are:

       Whiners

       Too Busies

       Experimenters

       Constant Rookies

       Divers

       Know-it-alls

       Fraidy-cats

       Nerds

       Breathless Wonders

      These labels may seem a bit trite, but each is an accurate description of the person involved. In each case the tech isn’t only performing in a way that’s detrimental to him or herself, but also in ways that can slow their team down, create wrinkles that shouldn’t exist in an otherwise good project, or even affect client relations. If you recog-nize any of these traits in yourself it would be a good idea to take a contemplative step back and review the approach you’ve taken so far in your career.

Whiners

      Whining is done by techs who want others to believe that something bad isn’t their fault. The lack of desire to accept responsibility for the occasional negative outcome is a common trait in all people, but the IT whiner brings this trait into the LAN room. The excuses can be routine, too. Either they were overworked, under-informed, or misguided in some way that