You selected your CIO’s favorite IT vendor for your new strategic project. They had the best marketing PowerPoint presentations, a smooth sales rep, compelling financials and a seemingly brilliant Sales-Support Engineer. Your engineering leaders indicated that this was the best option for you.

Six months into the project the delays and cost overruns are ruining your return on investment, the vendor needs more time to address the system’s bugs, there is no momentum as your engineers don’t really support the new system and user acceptance of the deliverables is very low.

What went wrong? Maybe your decision-making culture subtly encourages group-think and kills innovation. IT Leaders should encourage critical thinking and host dialog with alternative points of view. Creating an environment that encourages and rewards contrarians and innovators takes courage. It can be really challenging for leaders to be open to different opinions. “It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.” – Boris Yeltsin, Former President of Russia, Against the Grain, 1990.

As leaders, we always work with imperfect information when making decisions. Do you use critical thinking when evaluating the pros and cons of a decision? Do you challenge the credibility of your vendors and advisors, evaluate each person’s background, training, affiliations, education, or experience. Do you consider and debate alternative points of view, look at both sides before you make a decision? Do you create a culture at the top that promotes openness and safely makes room for debate and differing opinions?

Let me know what your experiences with group-think  has been and what critical thinking techniques you use to limit the risks of your technology decisions.

For more information on critical thinking visit http://www.procon.org/.

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Your staff will change their direction dramatically in response to either effective or ineffective metrics. Be wise when you choose what to track and publish. Watch for unintended consequences after you begin to report.

If, for example, you decide that the number of changes deployed per period is your metric, you better expect your staff to cut up their code into modules and make more changes as a result. Finding a metric that is more representative of a goal is better. Code changes implemented without a related failure or error is a more meaningful metric.

Leadership of large organizations has imperfect information on which to make decisions. This creates decision risk (the risk that any decision is incorrect) and professional risk for them. Risk contributes to stress and makes people uncomfortable. Colin Powell on Leadership was quoted as saying, “Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut.” This is the probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired.

Leaders turn to their managers to fill their information gap. They often ask for performance metrics based on what their experience tells them they need. Here are some factors that influence the IT decision making process.

• Prior work experiences,
• Relationships with other people such as vendors, peers and executive leadership
• External standards like COBIT, and MOF
• Internal policy,
• Industry best practices,
• Maturity models,
• Financial drivers and acumen.

The confluence of all these factors often results in a seeming endless stream of requests for metrics and information.

What things get done in IT should be set by leadership. How these things get done should be up Managers. IT Management is about getting your people to create and use the processes that gets things done with technology. Measurement and correlation is your job.

You need a balanced scorecard that gives your leadership relevant decision making information. What is an IT manager to do for a balance scorecard? Begin by identifying tools and processes used by your staff and everything you are able to measure. If your staff uses a compiler, can you get statistics? If there is a change management system, how many changes are made? Start with counting things.

Next identify the relationships between the things you can count. Measurements that correlate are the ratios you want. This is where you have to get careful. You will be changing behavior of your staff and informing leadership. The ratios must point to your mission.

Once you have what you can count, and some ideas of the ratios you can correlate, then you need to go after automation. Doing manual reports like this and doing spreadsheet drills, steals valuable one on one time from managers. When you are producing reports, you become an individual contributor. Remember that your job is to produce results through others. Go for automated reporting early and implement continuous improvement.

If you are stuck on what to report, COBIT Management Guidelines provides a Maturity Model framework with key goal indicators (KGIs) and key performance indicators (KPIs). For Development Managers, check out CMMI from Carnegie Melon. Infrastructure managers can always turn to ITIL. Another good reference is Mike Walker’s 2007 Blog.

Key Performance Indicators and Key Goal Indicators can keep you on track, inform leadership and influence your staff’s performance. Choose wisely, select repeatable processes, automate measurements and derive ratios that correlate and support your charter. Good luck.

Enterprise class information technology isn’t cool social networking tech, video games or end-user applications. It is decidedly not-cool.

It is the back office of banks, insurance companies, retailers and supply chain. Without it, the economy doesn’t work. Without the people to develop IT, support IT and operate IT, there is no food in the stores, no money in accounts, and no electricity.

Somebody has to manage IT, and if that somebody is you then there are three things you should know.

1. Managing IT requires self discipline and (often) boring work.
2. The eccentric ones are often the most brilliant. Don’t discount them.
3. Be careful what you choose to measure.

I will explore each of these and other principles of IT management in more detail over the course of the next several weeks but let’s look at each of these concepts in a little more detail here.

1. Managing requires self discipline and (often) boring work.
   

Setting goals, attending one-on-one meetings and attending staff meetings takes self discipline and time. You need to document goals, progress, performance and failure. Most IT managers hate setting and tracking goals, doing performance reviews. These require a lot of daily discipline to do well.

If you will write goals, track performance, host one-on-one and staff meetings, you will love getting and giving performance reviews because you and your team will be getting things done.

1. The eccentric ones are often the most brilliant. Don’t discount them.
   

Corporate IT organizations often attract brilliant people with social issues. Seek first to understand the eccentric staffer and their relationship to the office environment. Analyze their social style. Identify incentive factors that influence them.

Then assess their ability to contribute. Is the brilliant but eccentric staff member underpaid but able to contribute more? A brilliant person on the wrong track can often be corrected by new assignments that are compatible with their abilities.

1. Be careful what you choose to measure.
   

A successful IT manager measures everything relevant to their processes and then chooses to report metrics that support the manager’s direction and strategy. Identify tools and processes used by your staff. Discover what you are able to measure.

Next create ratios that represent the relationships between data. Don’t, for example, publish a metric on the number of changes deployed by person per period unless you want your staff to cut up their code into modules to make more changes. A better metric is failure rate per code change. This reflects quality and requires staff to deliver on your quality goal.

As an IT manager, you will be rewarded and challenged with staff successes, disappointed by under achievement and the struggle to motivate others to perform. Remember you are producing results through others so you serve them. If you consistently apply these principles then you will get stuff done and that is what you are accountable for; getting stuff done through others.