What to do when there’s too much work? Strategies for the harried IT manager, worker or peon
November 6, 2000 by Eric Svetcov
As some of you know, IThell.com is not my full-time job (truth be told, there are days when I wish it were). I am also Director of IT for a San Francisco dotcom startup as well (no snide remarks from the peanut gallery about how IT management doesn’t know anything about technology....I’m a working manager).
So, back to my story....surprise, surprise, my little IT group is buried with daily support and projects and I don’t think it’s going to get better anytime soon (I’m not scheduled to receive additional head count for quite a while). So, what’s an IT manager, worker, peon supposed to do?
First, don’t panic (Ok, I ripped that off from Douglas Adams....sue me). Needless to say, it’s true. The executives at your company already know that you are understaffed and so does any IT management senior to you. They are well aware that you cannot hope to do all the things you need to do in order to provide the level of service and support they want without you working 16 hours days, 7 days each week.
Why do they already know this? Because they purposely understaffed your group in order to save money. OK, maybe I’m giving some executives staffs a little too much credit. Actually, they purposely understaff IT because most executives consider IT to be one big black hole of expenses spiraling out of control and will only give you additional head count if you scream loud enough.....and your internal customers squeak so loud that even a totally unplugged CEO can hear them.
So, needless to say, you don’t need to panic, they already know they’ve created a situation where you are expected to succeed with insufficient resources (there are additional expectations like the computers are never supposed to have unscheduled downtime, but we’ll deal with that in a later article). For now we’ll concentrate on insufficient IT resources and the fine art of triage (hmmm, sounds almost like I ripped that off from another book).
So, you ask, what is triage? (from www.m-w.com) Main Entry: tri·age Pronunciation: trE-'äzh, 'trE-" Function: noun Etymology: French, sorting, sifting, from trier to sort, from Old French : the sorting of and allocation of treatment to patients and especially battle and disaster victims according to a system of priorities designed to maximize the number of survivors; broadly : the assigning of priority order to projects on the basis of where funds and resources can be best used or are most needed - triage transitive verb Click here to continue with Insufficient Resources and the Fine Art of Triage |