This post is geared towards individuals who are seasoned veterans inheriting a IT operations department or creating one from the ground up. It outlines several transformational strategies for 30, 60, 90 and 365 days.
Be Relentless, Be Strategic!
Leadership is complex. If you sit idle, you will fail. Below is a simple 1 week plan.
- Day 1: Assessment. What is the current state of what you walked into? Interview everyone (send emails). Invite people to lunch. You should be able to understand actual vs perceived reality. Be authentic and let everyone know that goals and plans will evolve overtime. You should have been able to compile a checklist or top 10 recommendations. Note: the most important perspective is delivery. It doesn’t matter how buttoned up something is — it can have the most elaborate processes — but if nothing is delivered or created you will fail and thus, your team will fail. Given that and because IT operations has many departments and disciplines — you must establish or define what a successful delivery aka work product is for each area.
- Day 2: Evaluate your team communication and collaboration. No status updates = no accountability. Lead by example and establish a task board (Monday.com, Jira, excel spreadsheet). Add your tasks first — be transparent. You’d be surprised by how your team will respond when they see you holding yourself accountable. Next establish or evaluate knowledge management, how are standard operating procedures documented?
- Day 3: Schedule 12 meetings on your calendar to “communicate wins.” Each of the 12 are 1 hour monthly personal working sessions you use to draft, summarize, and share your team’s wins. Share “the message” across internal media (intranet, email, slack channels, etc). Leverage your team members for contributions.
- Day 4: Introduce a process of execution. I favor scrum or agile that leverages a consistent repertoire and has little overhead. Start with a daily “stand-up”. If a daily stand-up exists does it clearly hold each person accountable? If not, reboot ASAP. Remember, at this point you’re not changing or setting new dates or timeframes, you’re simply observing behavior. I recommend asking the team to teach you the company culture and values and challenge each person to live up to them. Communicate the frequency and purpose of the stand-up and/or the value it brings with the minor or major changes that need to be made for the team to deliver.
- Day 5: Summarization, decomposition, and decompression. At the end of the first week, celebrate with your team. Go out to lunch or order in drinks/food. Your afternoon should be all planning and preparation for the next 30, 60, 90 and 365 days.
In the first week you will work long hours to ramp up and acclimate. Everything you’ve done thus far will pay off in 360 days. If after the first week it’s still not clear what needs to change in the next 30 days then repeat week 1.
30, 60, 90 and 365
You may individually contribute to your team’s work product or you may not. Regardless, your now responsible for delivering business value everyday.
Below are areas that need to be actioned upon for the next 30, 60, 90 and 365 days.
- Human Capital and Career Growth
- Process Automation for simplification.
- Succession Planning
- Roadmaps
Hopefully after reading this you have gained some transformational strategies for 30, 60, 90 and 365 days. Please comment below.