December 30th, 2008

How to be a better techie in 2009

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 3:55 pm

Categories: Business Technology, Cubicle Culture, IT Skills, Job Hunting, Work-Life Balance

Tags: Hiring, Information Technology, Professional Development, Recruitment & Selection, Strategy, Career, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Management, Deb Perelman

In 2009, this could be you.

… Cure cancer, run that three-minute mile, save the whales… remember when your New Years Resolutions were downright triumphant? These days, they sound a whole lot more sober: “I hope I’ll have a job in January,” said one reader. “Contract work with no benefits is all I see out there,” commented another. World peace, anyone?

Yet the Web is full of advice for IT professionals on how they can be become better, more hireable pros. Not all of it is realistic, though it sure beats “cross your fingers and hope your job is still there after vacation”. Here are some of my favorites, and the things I would bank on getting you the furthest in the new year.

1. Pay attention to where the hiring is.

We all get caught up in our work. We all bear down for months and even years at a time on one all-encompassing project or another — this is a good thing — but the danger is in looking up and seeing that the field around you has changed. Keeping your eye on the “prize” so to speak — where the hiring is still taking place, even in a downturn — is essential for continued career success.

So where is this mythical hiring surge? It depends on who you ask, of course. Some people, such as Read Write Web’s Jobwire, point to the growing use of community managers and new media specialists and that developers are still being hired at twice the pace of sales and marketing folks. Others put their money on SAP, .Net and help desk support. But all agree that even in a downturn, there will be small pockets of growth.

2. Keep your skills current.

Advising tech pros to keep their skills current may be advice as old as time, but it doesn’t change the fact that if you’re still boasting skills at the top of your IT resume that haven’t been a central focus of enterprise organizations in years, or worse, a decade, you’re going to have a harder time selling yourself for a promotion or to a new company.

It’s not something to put off, either. “Any IT Pro knows that keeping up with the latest technology is a career key. Make it easy on yourself by reading technology news and subscribing to various newsletters and technology magazines. If you keep up consistently, you can’t be overwhelmed by falling behind,” explained Kristin Clifford at CompTIA.

3. Be a documenting fiend.

Most IT departments are a place where the cowboys still roam — the “cowboy” being the guy that everyone in the department depends on because he or she knows how to run things. Productivity can hinge on them, and dangerously so.

But this is now an age of standardized processes — things like CMMI and ITIL are more popular than ever — and documentation is at the core of this. Being someone who is organized and keeps track of what they’ve done, even if your boss doesn’t require it, will mean that you can always reference your work so that your successes can be repeatable. If this is where IT is going, you want to be there first. Heck, you might even like it.

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December 10th, 2008

The steep price of good technology

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 9:30 am

Categories: Business Technology, Economy

Tags: NetFlix Inc., Specialist, Outsourcing, It Operations, Business Operations, Outsourcing & Subcontracting, Deb Perelman

Netflix says that Silverlight was too good for some technical specialists own good.

If you’ve been in the technology field for long enough, and (hopefully) survived enough rounds of layoffs, by now you’ve probably heard every reason in the book that an organization has had to eliminate jobs: They were bought by another company and there were departmental redundancies. They can get the work done in India/China/[Insert Your Outsourcing Destination Here] for half the price. The recession has affected their bottom line and they need to make across-the-board cuts. They’ve decided to discontinue your project.

[My goodness, that there is a depressing list.]

But today I read a new one: the technology, you see, it is too good. It doesn’t break as much. They don’t need as many techies to maintain it. In short, they may need less of you.

This was the case with Netflix, which announced in a Dec. 7 blog entry that it would be eliminating the positions of 50 technical specialists. The reason? “We just don’t have the technical specialist work for them to do in Customer Service because of the improvements in our streaming player,” said VP of Corporate Communications, Steve Swasey.

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August 18th, 2008

Data architects: You're "hot"

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 4:01 pm

Categories: Business Technology, IT Skills, Job Hunting

Tags: Role, Forrester Research Inc., Recruitment & Selection, Professional Development, Operational Planning, Training And Certification, Strategy, Security, Human Resources, Workforce Management

Yes you are.

Information and data architects and information security experts, here’s some good news: You’re the hottest.

Fear not, data and content-oriented business analysts, business and enterprise architects and vendor management experts: You’re extremely hot as well. Enterprise application strategists, IT planners, network architects and enterprise project managers, you’re not doing so badly either. And account managers, desktop/virtualization experts, mobile operations and device experts, service managers and business process analysts? They want to keep you around as well.

So what’s all this about? I mean, surely it’s not every day that you’re called hot on the basis of your IT job alone, yet in a new Forrester report, these 16 roles are called out as being what CIOs need right now. And if you’re already doing them?

Hot.

According to Forrester, the need for these workers is being driven by a mixture of factors, including changes in technology, a greater emphasis on risk-management and a limited supply of key roles. But they had some themes in common, as well.

The “hottest” ones, such as information and data architects, emphasized policy-making and oversight for data and security. Others, such as enterprise architects, emphasized information and process management, as well as vendor oversight. Roles such as enterprise project managers and IT planners were considered key because they coordinated business units and complex projects.

However, even if you’re not in one of these roles already, there’s still time to change this. Forrester vice president and principal analyst Marc Cecere encourages CIOs without the right mix of these people in their departments to find ways to rectify this, by tailoring career paths and incentives to these roles and by cultivating them from within their departments.

“Many of the hot roles required breadth, influence without formal power and knowledge of company culture,” explains Cecere. “Rather than hiring these from the outside, source roles (like account managers or business process analysts) from within. This can be done by recruiting from the business functions and units, or through job rotation, training, and management of individual career paths.”

In other words, even if you’re not the “hottest” right now, there’s still hope.

August 7th, 2008

When IT culture changes with or without you

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 6:05 am

Categories: Business Technology, Cubicle Culture

Tags: culture, information technology, strategy, management, deb perelman

Are you suddenly a bad fit for your IT department?

Workplace culture is one of those terms you hear HR professionals, executive strategists and job boards throw around all the time, but what it means is generally less clear–and usually depends on who’s doing the talking. HR pros often speak about their workplace’s culture in terms of selling their attitude toward work to new candidates, execs in terms of employee productivity and the bottom line and job boards to goad you into a better one, perhaps one that is a better fit for you.

However, what all have in common is that conversations about workplace culture are more often about “transforming” or changing it than embracing the status quo.

IT is no different. In a new report, Forrester interviewed 15 CIOs and 41 IT decision makers about IT culture, and signs–from an unclear IT mission to a top heavy decision-making process or employees that are discouraged from extending their skills sets–that an overhaul is needed. Though CIOs and IT leaders are advised on how to go about making big changes to their IT culture, less is said about what changes could mean for the staffers within the department.

“It depends on the nature of the change,” explained principal analyst and report author, Marc Cecere. A culture change from decisions being made from a large to a small group of people might force an employee to quickly adjust the way they get things done. A change from a U.S.-centric IT organization to a global one might put pressure on a worker to adjust their schedule, and their way of communicating with customers to fit the culture.

However, the message is that the onus is on the IT professionals to adapt to the changes being made within their departments. Yet most employees have from time to time felt that the culture of their group was changing and perhaps leaving them behind. Is the only option to quietly plot one’s escape?

“First you’d want to make sure that things have really changed in a way that shuts you out. Sometimes you just perceive that things aren’t going your way. This is something that happens on the lower levels of the organization, where they only see a small part of the organization,” said Cecere.

“If the change is not in sync with your ethics, that’s one thing. But if it’s about the way decisions are made, who makes the decisions, global versus local, that is not in sync with what you think it should be, consider how much it matters, or consider that you might just be dealing with what you know versus what you can learn.”

August 1st, 2008

Gartner's grim IT hiring outlook

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 9:12 am

Categories: Business Technology, Economy, IT Skills, Job Hunting

Tags: Hiring, Information Technology, Gartner Inc., Recruitment & Selection, Strategy, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Management, Deb Perelman

IT professionals are seeing signs like this.

Gartner released its 2008 IT market compensation study this week and the news was anything but upbeat. Projecting that IT organizations would be cautious about their 2008 and 2009 hiring plans due to IT budget cuts, a decline in IT hiring is anticipated.

Though nearly 58 percent of U.S.-based IT organizations projected an increase in their IT staff levels, including full-time employees and contractors, this was a notable drop from the 66 percent who reported the same in the 2007 study. Furthermore, the percentage of organizations that projected that they’d be increasing their headcount by more than 10 percent in the coming year slipped more than three percentage points from the year prior.

So what will this mean if you were hoping to land a new gig or full-time job in the coming year? Diane Berry, managing vice president for Gartner’s CIO workforce group and a coauthor on of the study, says that the best way for IT professionals to improve their marketability to pick up as much business experience and competence as possible.

“The HR leaders and CIOs I talk to are having a hard time finding the talent that they need,” Berry explained. “They’re looking for some people with business expertise or competence, who are keeping their skills relevant. They’re hungry for good talent, and it would be best to learn as much of the business as you can. It increases your value tenfold.”

What this means for IT workers that would like to stay entrenched in technology is less clear.

“You’re going to need to have that business expertise, so if I was an 18-year old going into college I would be marrying my CS degree with a business degree,” said Berry.

Do you agree? Do you think pure tech players are going to have a rougher time in the coming year than those that hone their business skills?

July 24th, 2008

10 things your IT project manager never wants to hear

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 7:12 am

Categories: Business Technology, Project Management

Tags: Information Technology, Project Manager, Project Management, Tools & Techniques, Strategy, It Operations, It service Management, Management, Deb Perelman

“This isn’t what we were expecting.”

“The dog ate my presentation.”
“We’ve decided to change directions.”
“I’m dumping this employee on you who has failed at every other thing we’ve assigned them.”

IT project managers have heard it all, but they still shudder when they hear these excuses because the number of things that can set a project behind schedule or completely off-course are numbered to infinity–but that’s not even the worst of it. Below, a round-up of the ten words and phrases that project managers say send such fear into their hearts, they must fight the urge to run for the hills.

1. “I have a challenge for you.” Often uttered by a CIO or high-level manager in an upbeat, enthusiastic tone, this proposition sends most project managers running in the other direction, as they know all-too-well that “challenge” usually means “the CEO has read something in an in-flight magazine and its now very, very important for us to embrace it to be ahead of the game,” says Cornelius Fichtner, an IT project manager based in Silverado, CA who produces The Project Management Podcast.

“That usually means that you’re about to get a project that is absolutely impossible to succeed with, impossible deadlines, no budget, no people and by the way you have to do this on top of everything else you need to do.”

2. “One minor change.” The only person who thinks this change is “minor” is the one requesting it, say project managers.

“The customer often thinks its a small thing but it’s actually a huge change in the philosophy and architecture of the project you’re doing,” said Fichtner. “But micro-changes will be exhausting as well… all of the ‘two moves to the left’ and ‘a hue bluer’–dozens of little things that require more work.”

3. “Rearchitecting” The decision to rebuild something from scratch rather than taking the time to make sense of the earlier work done on a project is rampant in project management, say its weathered team leaders, and it’s always because the predecessor had “no idea what they were doing.”

“Rearchitecting, it seems, is every engineer’s wet dream,” the software project manager behind the blog The Cranky Product Manager, tells ZDNet. “How could an engineer possibly be expected to understand the code their predecessor wrote? Better to tear down the entire house–even though its residents are perfectly sheltered–in order to remodel the bathroom or put a cover over the patio.”

4. “This new [fad] technology would be perfect.” Some project managers cringe at the words “fits perfectly,” because in most cases, is rarely is.

Says the Cranky Product Manager, those obsessed with the newest technologies often forget about little things like deadlines. This thing needs to be DONE in two weeks and we don’t have time for the developer to learn the latest resume-enhancing technology on the job while that clock is ticking,” she explains.

This phrase often goes hand-in-hand with “Let’s use this new, untested method instead,” when “untested” anything can be the bane of any project manager’s existence, says Thomas Cutting, a project manager who blogs at Cuttings Edge.

5. “I was too busy firefighting to finish.” More than a ‘dog ate my homework’-level excuse, employees assigned to projects that are only one piece of their grueling jobs is an unfortunate reality that project manager constantly deal with.

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July 10th, 2008

IT pros: Choose a side

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 6:56 am

Categories: Business Technology, IT Skills, Leadership, Offshore Outsourcing

Tags: Information Technology, Strategy, Management, Deb Perelman

One of the biggest aggravations I hear vented from the mouths and keyboards of IT professionals is that someone, someone keeps moving their cheese.

What they’re talking about is IT benchmarks, and the fact that they’re constantly shifting. First you’re told to know a single technology like the back of your hand and then you’re told that being too entrenched in a technology can be a career-limiting move. You’ve been told to stock up on certifications to justify your piece of an organization’s payroll and then learned that some of the letters after your names weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. One year you’re assigned a desk in the dark room at the end of the hall and another you’re told to put on a suit and get an MBA if you want a job destined to stay on this continent.

Constantly re-marketing oneself as the IT professional du jour can be exhausting, to say the least.

“I’ve seen a lot of different flavors of The Solution. There’s training, certifications, new skills, new roles… The process of shifting gears every 18 months turns us into puppets,” a consultant in Southern California with nearly three decades of IT experience told me.

“Whenever Manager Bill decides to change his paradigm, we end up going through six to nine months of redoing our work and then bridging two very different environments, and very few people want to talk about standards so we’re not always reinventing the wheel.”

Well, here’s one more to add to the pile: In a recent conversation with Forrester vice president and research director, Alex Cullen, he told me that they believe it is the IT organization that going to go through a drastic change in the next decade, with some splitting off from the departments we recognize today to become what he calls “renegades.” And not surprisingly, IT pros will have to figure out where and how they want to fit in.

“You have to pick,” said Cullen. “The traditional IT organizations will stay in the traditional IT mindset–they’re all about IT excellence. IT is a factory, and they’re running it that way. The people who know Java and databases and configurations will go to this one.”

But at the fork in the road, some IT leaders will take a risk and aim for full integration with business by becoming all about peer relationships, product insight and service innovation. The department heads will be top company executives, and the people within the organizations will barely touch technology.

“The MBAs will ultimately go here. They’re in their own separate organization and they’ll spend all of their time on business stuff, and thinking about customer loyalty. They’ll have a team in India that does all of their development work,” said Cullen.

In some ways, Cullen’s views about the new direction of some IT departments could be a relief for techies who have been perplexed as to why they would need to be DBAs and MBAs and IT project managers–i.e. everything under the sun. But there’s going to be little left for pure techies among the IT renegades.

So does this mean that some IT professionals should drop everything and become pure business technology players?

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