Michael
I've got 20 years in IT management, and I've been running small IT
depts like you describe for fifteen of them. Here's the benefit of my
aged wisdom -- just think of me as an old guy with long grey hair and
a beard :)
It's best to think of it as a set of management processes that you're
going to have to control
I'll deal with Organisational matters first.
Communication Management
You need to decide the process of communicating your decisions, both
internal and external. This will usually consist of a set of
guidelines and work instructions for dealing with staff, change
requests to your systems, requests for new work, other businesses,
customers and the media. I'm sure you can come up with other areas
that will be spercific to your office.
Performance Management
You'll need to define the processes used to measure the
efficiency of the department. This can encompass staff efficiency and
performance assessment, mechanical equipment efficiency, and procedure
efficiency including audits of all your processes. Your department is
going to be liable for a financial budget, and someone will wanty to
know how the department is doing. By having performance management
stats in place you'll be able to tell anybody that asks. There are
many software packages around that will handle some or all of these
management processes.
Configuration Management
Configuration management is closely tied to performance management and
defines processes and procedures to cover the management of the
physical assets of the department ie the PC's and all associated
peices of IT. You'll have a decision to make as to whether you support
all the kit yourself, or whether you liase with a third part supplier
to cover some or all of the support. The terms of your agreement with
the supplier will depend on whether your covering the kit for 24
hours, 7 days a week or not.
If you decide to do your own support you should be aware that you're
going to need PC hardware expertise, software expertise. release
managment expertise, networking expertise, man managemnent expertise,
training expertise etc. The list is long, and four people is a small
department to cover 100 users.
Configuration management will also cover how the department handles
all
materials both entering and leaving its control ie goods in and out,
including all hardware and software. For this to be effective you'll
need a very highly controlled release management system, and I suggest
that one of the four staff would be delegated to this task on almost a
full time basis.
Requirement Management
Tied to configuration management is requirement management which is
the forward planning process that identifies in advance what the
department will require over a set period of time, usually involving
procedures covering budgeting and project planning. For this you need
a close liaison with your user base, and it is best to have a small
number of users who have decision making abilities on behalf of the
user population as a whole. I usually try to set up a User Panel, who
meet regularly, and get one from senior management (who holds the
purse strings), and the rest (no more than three or four) drawn from a
cross section of the user population. This group, and the IT
department manager, meet to decide on the department's IT strategy,
both long and short term.
It is best to have a strategy document that runs for at least two
years into the future, that way budgeting and accounting are made a
whole lot easier. What I've done in the past is draw up the document
in draft form myself before taking it to the User panel. That way I
made sure all the IT department's needs were included up front at the
start of "negotiations".
In addition the department will need to have policies on
- security, both PC and network
- physical security of servers
- asset register. You'll need to keep track of all physical assets.
- backup procedures, either on or off site
- internet usage by staff
- lifetime of kit eg when do your PCs become effectively obselete? How
long will your servers last etc
- interfaces within the company eg any processing between servers
- external interfaces. Do you take data in or send it out from outside
the company boundaries. If so, how secure is it, when do you do it
etc.
THe above policies are normally documented in a set of work
instructions used by all members of staff and kept up to date by the
IT department.
Procurement Management
Procurement management defines processes to cover the purchase of all
materials required to run the company, the invoicing for the same,
returns of unwanted goods, chasing up of said goods and possibly
administration of the budget through an accounting dept. You may have
to fo this yourself, or you may have an accounting function in the
larger compant that will deal with it for you, but it is always best
for the IT department to keep its own records of expenditure whatever
method is used. It the IT department is expected to do it themselves,
then this task alone will take up a large chunk of the IT manager's
time.
Program / Portfolio Management
Program/Portfolio management covers the processes required to manage
the department's business eg this process will cover the management of
the software development processes, any roll-outs of new Software, and
roll-outs of hardware, kit upgrades etc, from conception through to
delivery, with procedures, budgets, staff work outlines and plans for
the efficient completion of each phase of the Project or group of
projects.
You need to have an efficient, tightly controlled, project management
process. There are several software packages around that will help you
do this, the easist to use of which is probably MS Project from
Microsoft, since it utilises a standard MS interface, is a well
established product with a huge user base, and it has extensice help
which incidentally covers just about all the topics in this answer.
Quality Management
The Quality management process describes the quality control to be
applied to all the other processes and summarises the control
procedures to be used. It generally consists of a Quality managemnent
individual who will control the Quality System of the department,
including Operational Management controls, procedures and work
instructions needed to ensure that the stated quality, operational and
contractual obligations of the company are met. Quality Management
implies a continuous investigation of the department's processes to
ensure continual control, and improvement wherever necessary.
This sounds daunting, but generally it means that, if you have
procedures in place for all the other processes mentionsed, you should
review them, at least annually, to ensure they are still relevant,
and, at these reviews, check to see if there are any efficiency
improvements you can make.
Risk Management
The risk management process generally consists of individual(s) tasked
to quantify risks to the department and who develop procedures to
mitigate these risks and to form departmental plans to ensure that all
risks to the department are identified and factored in to any policy
decisions that have to be made. Generally this is done while
formulating the IT strategy, and also done in isolation for any major
pieces of work such as a roll out of a new version of Windows etc
Now for the human factors
As you can imagine, these are less easily quantifiable, but the
department can define the processes which cover payroll, training,
staff sickness, staff holidays, training, recruitment, retirement,
pensions and redunancy planning. As with the procurement process
mentioned above, some or all of these may be handled by the company as
a whole, but the manager of the IT department will at least have to
maintain records of them for each member of staff, and may have to
organise some or more of the following for staff members
- shift rota
- holidays
- sickness reporting
- performance reviews
- salary reviews
- training plans for each staff member
- work rotas
- long term career plans for each staff member
Someone will need to decide on a staff structure for the department,
and this is best done by defining roles and responsibilities for each
staff member. One possible layout is as follows:
IT department manager
- responsible for budgeting, strategy, staff personnel matters, team
leading, asset management and all forward planning activities
Team member 1
- responsible for the physical assets of the department. In charge of
network, network securiry, all PC assets, hardware support etc
Team member 2
- responsible for all PC software, upgrades, software support etc
Team member 3
- responsible for release control, asset register, server
administration, backups and interfaces
This is only a crude model - the whole thing is a huge subject and
there is a great deal of information available on the internet
You'll find many papers on IT management at
Bitpipe: Systems Management
http://www.bitpipe.com/data/rlist?t=987097377_2199321&sort_by=status&src=google
A good site for project management processes
Project Management processes, deliverables, articles and tools
http://www.gantthead.com/Gantthead/departments/departmentPage/1,1517,6,00.html
A great example of an IT System Management process from IBM
System Management Concepts: Operating System and Devices
http://publibn.boulder.ibm.com/doc_link/en_US/a_doc_lib/aixbman/admnconc/admnconc02.htm#ToC
Search Strategy
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22IT+management+processes%22 |
Clarification of Answer by
willie-ga
on
30 Sep 2002 08:23 PDT
Sorry Michael - I posted the non-spell checked version by mistake.
(bad procedures, I'll have to tighten up on that one :) Here's a
clean version
I've got 20 years in IT management, and I've been running small IT
depts like you describe for fifteen of them. Here's the benefit of my
aged wisdom -- just think of me as an old guy with long grey hair and
a beard :)
It's best to think of it as a set of management processes that you're
going to have to control
I'll deal with Organisational matters first.
Communication Management
You need to decide the process of communicating your decisions, both
internal and external. This will usually consist of a set of
guidelines and work instructions for dealing with staff, change
requests to your systems, requests for new work, other businesses,
customers and the media. I'm sure you can come up with other areas
that will be specific to your office.
Performance Management
You'll need to define the processes used to measure the
efficiency of the department. This can encompass staff efficiency and
performance assessment, mechanical equipment efficiency, and procedure
efficiency including audits of all your processes. Your department is
going to be liable for a financial budget, and someone will want to
know how the department is doing. By having performance management
stats in place you'll be able to tell anybody that asks. There are
many software packages around that will handle some or all of these
management processes.
Configuration Management
Configuration management is closely tied to performance management and
defines processes and procedures to cover the management of the
physical assets of the department i.e. the PC's and all associated
pieces of IT. You'll have a decision to make as to whether you support
all the kit yourself, or whether you liaise with a third part supplier
to cover some or all of the support. The terms of your agreement with
the supplier will depend on whether your covering the kit for 24
hours, 7 days a week or not.
If you decide to do your own support you should be aware that you're
going to need PC hardware expertise, software expertise. release
management expertise, networking expertise, man management expertise,
training expertise etc. The list is long, and four people is a small
department to cover 100 users.
Configuration management will also cover how the department handles
all materials both entering and leaving its control i.e. goods in and
out,
including all hardware and software. For this to be effective you'll
need a very highly controlled release management system, and I suggest
that one of the four staff would be delegated to this task on almost a
full time basis.
Requirement Management
Tied to configuration management is requirement management which is
the forward planning process that identifies in advance what the
department will require over a set period of time, usually involving
procedures covering budgeting and project planning. For this you need
a close liaison with your user base, and it is best to have a small
number of users who have decision making abilities on behalf of the
user population as a whole. I usually try to set up a User Panel, who
meet regularly, and get one from senior management (who holds the
purse strings), and the rest (no more than three or four) drawn from a
cross section of the user population. This group, and the IT
department manager, meet to decide on the department's IT strategy,
both long and short term.
It is best to have a strategy document that runs for at least two
years into the future, that way budgeting and accounting are made a
whole lot easier. What I've done in the past is draw up the document
in draft form myself before taking it to the User panel. That way I
made sure all the IT department's needs were included up front at the
start of "negotiations".
In addition the department will need to have policies on
- security, both PC and network
- physical security of servers
- asset register. You'll need to keep track of all physical assets.
- backup procedures, either on or off site
- internet usage by staff
- lifetime of kit eg when do your PCs become effectively obsolete? How
long will your servers last etc
- interfaces within the company eg any processing between servers
- external interfaces. Do you take data in or send it out from outside
the company boundaries. If so, how secure is it, when do you do it
etc.
The above policies are normally documented in a set of work
instructions used by all members of staff and kept up to date by the
IT department.
Procurement Management
Procurement management defines processes to cover the purchase of all
materials required to run the company, the invoicing for the same,
returns of unwanted goods, chasing up of said goods and possibly
administration of the budget through an accounting dept. You may have
to do this yourself, or you may have an accounting function in the
larger company that will deal with it for you, but it is always best
for the IT department to keep its own records of expenditure whatever
method is used. It the IT department is expected to do it themselves,
then this task alone will take up a large chunk of the IT manager's
time.
Program / Portfolio Management
Program/Portfolio management covers the processes required to manage
the department's business eg this process will cover the management of
the software development processes, any roll-outs of new Software, and
roll-outs of hardware, kit upgrades etc, from conception through to
delivery, with procedures, budgets, staff work outlines and plans for
the efficient completion of each phase of the Project or group of
projects.
You need to have an efficient, tightly controlled, project management
process. There are several software packages around that will help you
do this, the easiest to use of which is probably MS Project from
Microsoft, since it utilises a standard MS interface, is a well
established product with a huge user base, and it has extensive help
which incidentally covers just about all the topics in this answer.
Quality Management
The Quality management process describes the quality control to be
applied to all the other processes and summarises the control
procedures to be used. It generally consists of a Quality management
individual who will control the Quality System of the department,
including Operational Management controls, procedures and work
instructions needed to ensure that the stated quality, operational and
contractual obligations of the company are met. Quality Management
implies a continuous investigation of the department's processes to
ensure continual control, and improvement wherever necessary.
This sounds daunting, but generally it means that, if you have
procedures in place for all the other processes mentioned, you should
review them, at least annually, to ensure they are still relevant,
and, at these reviews, check to see if there are any efficiency
improvements you can make.
Risk Management
The risk management process generally consists of individual(s) tasked
to quantify risks to the department and who develop procedures to
mitigate these risks and to form departmental plans to ensure that all
risks to the department are identified and factored in to any policy
decisions that have to be made. Generally this is done while
formulating the IT strategy, and also done in isolation for any major
pieces of work such as a roll out of a new version of Windows etc
Now for the human factors
As you can imagine, these are less easily quantifiable, but the
department can define the processes which cover payroll, training,
staff sickness, staff holidays, training, recruitment, retirement,
pensions and redundancy planning. As with the procurement process
mentioned above, some or all of these may be handled by the company as
a whole, but the manager of the IT department will at least have to
maintain records of them for each member of staff, and may have to
organise some or more of the following for staff members
- shift rota
- holidays
- sickness reporting
- performance reviews
- salary reviews
- training plans for each staff member
- work rota
- long term career plans for each staff member
Someone will need to decide on a staff structure for the department,
and this is best done by defining roles and responsibilities for each
staff member. One possible layout is as follows:
IT department manager
- responsible for budgeting, strategy, staff personnel matters, team
leading, asset management and all forward planning activities
Team member 1
- responsible for the physical assets of the department. In charge of
network, network security, all PC assets, hardware support etc
Team member 2
- responsible for all PC software, upgrades, software support etc
Team member 3
- responsible for release control, asset register, server
administration, backups and interfaces
This is only a crude model - the whole thing is a huge subject and
there is a great deal of information available on the internet
You'll find many papers on IT management at
Bitpipe: Systems Management
http://www.bitpipe.com/data/rlist?t=987097377_2199321&sort_by=status&src=google
A good site for project management processes
Project Management processes, deliverables, articles and tools
http://www.gantthead.com/Gantthead/departments/departmentPage/1,1517,6,00.html
A great example of an IT System Management process from IBM
System Management Concepts: Operating System and Devices
http://publibn.boulder.ibm.com/doc_link/en_US/a_doc_lib/aixbman/admnconc/admnconc02.htm#ToC
Search Strategy
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22IT+management+processes%22
|
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