IT Management
By Philip | April 19, 2011
There are a lot of administrative and non-administrative works that involve a lot of people, whether people in an IT Department, or even with people from outside the IT Department. It needs a management to reach the company’s goal, either it is internal goal or external goal that need to be accomplished. Management, is a process that includes planning, organizing, directing, and controlling.
Planning - A manager needs to think precisely what actions and steps they are going to take. It’s a bridge between where we are and where we are going to go. “Well plan is half done” is correctly said.
“Planning is the selecting and relating of facts and the making and using of assumptions regarding the future in the visualization to achieve desire results.”
GEORGE TERRY
Organizing - A concept of organizing an IT Department is actually put in the System Development Life Cycle. All management concepts are applied into the SDLC.
Directing - Manager positions himself as a coordinator, and the rest of the team is the manager’s extension in doing the act. In this case, a manager only directs the team, and the workloads are then distributed.
Controlling - Controlling is needed to know if what has been planned is being done correctly, in time. Controlling involves many components in an organization, such as another functional area manager, users, and IT Department staffs.
In a newer definition, there are more basic functions of a management, other than the classic planning, organizing, directing, monitoring process. Management also involves staffing, and motivating.
Staffing - an important managerial function that involves manning the organization structure by going through a proper and effective selection, appraisal and development of the staffs to fill the roles assigned. Simply put, staffing includes assessing the personel needs, selecting and training of employees, determining remuneration, evaluating performance, and establishing effective communication skills.
Motivation - an art of stimulating someone to get designed course of action, or better defined as to push the right button to get desired action. The basic principle of motivation is based upon the carrot or stick policy.
“Put a carrot in front of donkey to make it move or Jab his with a stick being.”
There are some basic roles that is covered in a management, they are interpersonal, informational, and decisional. An interpersonal role involves coordination and interaction with staffs/employees, while informational role involves handling, sharing, and analyzing information. Decisional role on the other hand, involves decision-making skills.
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Migrating from a Programmer to an IT Enterpreneur
By Philip | April 18, 2011
Have you ever considered being an entrepreneur? Why don’t you build your own company for yourself, positioning yourself as both CEO and CIO, and directing your company along with your inspiration and motivation. There are a lot of business area in the IT field that you can get into, one of them is building a software house. Mostly, software house consists of a tested, solid team that can solve problems and proven to be successful in solving problems.
It is not easy migrating from a programmer into an entrepreneur, you need to be business minded, rather than only having an advanced programming skills. Building a software house is harder than being a programmer. Your programming skills won’t count that much on running your own software house. There are few things that you are going to need such as business skill, marketing, planning, and more, but a good, solid team will surely help you in fields that you don’t master. Don’t rely on only yourself, you have your team that you can count on.
Here are few things that you’ll need to know when you’re going to move into an entrepreneur:
- Your product needs to be marketable. If you’re making a software, think about your customer, if they’ll use your program or not.
- Product packaging. Most people judge a book by its’ cover.
- Think of a long term plan. You’re not making a program, you’re selling and distributing it.
- Your customer might not actually know what they want. Communication is important.
- Love your consumer. They might request things that they might later regret, educate your customer with their need, respectfully.
- User interface must be simple and friendly. Don’t make your software looks complicated although your software is high end.
- Try asking a third person opinion, from people who might use the program, that doesn’t know the process of software making. Pay attention to their response.
- Learn to be an entrepreneur just like you learnt to be a programmer. Read books, find informations on being an entrepreneur.
- Build a solid, commited team.
Software house business is a promising business fields. A lot of small projects that are looking for a good, suitable, and affordable software with smaller target. Competitive price and good software quality will be a good value for your customer.
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Building an External Relationship
By Philip | April 17, 2011
Outside the internal departments of your company there are a lot of other components that are involved in your company, especially in your IT department. There are a lot of external components such as customers, manufacturers, governments, communities, and mass media. There are some sort of relationship forms with each components such as press conference, press release, special events, sending gifts, and publications. External relationships are often underestimated, but there are a lot of benefits from having a good external relationship with some if not all of your outside components.
You surely have involved with external IT manufacture. Having a good external relationship will give more benefits to you and your IT department. For example, you get extra service such as new hardware and software news and repairs, also they will help in giving pros and cons of their product. You won’t be a mere consumer to them. You can even outsource parts of your information resources on hardware or even software for them to manage.
A good relationship will last long, and usually we wouldn’t want to change from a company to others if we already have satisfying experience from certain company. Even if you move from a company from another, a good relationship will still help you in your new company by still providing services to you as they were.
Here are some important tips on building external relationship.
- Introduce yourself, introduce who you are, your position in your company, and your responsibility. Your name card shall briefly describe yourself.
- You must know who you are introducing yourself to, whether they are shop owner, IT manager in other company, or a sales representative of an IT supplier. It is important for you to know what you need from them and what they can offer to you for more facilities.
- Personal things might develop later but firstly, formalities would make a good start of a relationship.
These tips above is a good basic for building an external relationship, by following the tips, taking actions and paying a good attention on your own experience, you would learn from your own experience and build a good knowledge on building external relationship that works for you, because as we know, some ideas work good with some people, while other not. But the above tips will cover a real basic needs, that you will be able to improve yourself gradually as you progress.
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