Month: May 2009

Dear Vendor:

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Someone (a vendor, of course!) recently pointed out to me that I’m not so easy on vendors in my Tweets. So I figured it might be an interesting exercise to humorously dissect my relationships with vendors in the form of some “how to” letters to anonymous vendors.

Dear Vendor:

Thank you so much for calling to see if you can get my business. Unfortunately, your telephone signal was so unclear that I could neither understand your name nor number. Have a good life!

Dear Vendor:

Well, I assume you’re a vendor. You didn’t mention a company name, and your voice mail just said, “Please give me a call.” I didn’t find your name in the company directory or on my vendor contact list, so I assume you had the wrong number?

Dear Vendor:

That testy voice mail you left me whining about how you have been trying to get me and you hope I’m polite enough to call you back? Yeah; not so much.

Dear Vendor:

I think we got started wrong. I walked up to your booth wearing a suit and a convention name tag. Despite my utter lack of cleavage, you somehow thought I was a booth babe. Then you looked completely shocked when I happened to mention that I was the head of an IT department and might be in the market for your product. I’m wondering which forehead tattoo might have helped clear up the situation, and would really appreciate your help choosing one from the following list:

  • NOT a booth babe.
  • BS from MIT + MBA (highest honors) from Simmons
  • IT Director
  • Both a beauty AND a geek
  • Brains inside!

Sincerely,
Jenn

But seriously, if you’re a vendor and want my business, be friendly, understand what my company does, and solve a problem for me. If I don’t have a problem for you to solve right now, accept it gracefully and let me know that you’d still like to build a relationship with me. That’s what works for me, and will probably work for most of my colleagues as well.

On Transparency, Part III

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To continue my omphaloskepsis on transparency, I find myself asking the question, “Why bother if they don’t even look for the information?”

A comment on my last post pointed out that the meeting wasn’t the point–the availability of the information was. While I certainly agree, I should mention that nearly all the information was already available in a central repository or two, but people still kept asking me for it. Saying, “go look here” every time seems awfully rude.

Which brings me back to my initial question: why invest the time and energy making the information available if no one uses the resources?

I’ve heard answers to this question like, “You have to train them.” Or, “They might only use the information if nothing else is available, but that’s when it’s really valuable.” While both answers have merit, there’s still one elephant in the room to me: scarce resources.

In this economy, very few IT departments have adequate resources. Some of us struggle to find the bodies for day-to-day support. Others can do that, but run out of bodies if anything goes wrong. Still others can handle those, but can’t do any projects. Given that daily user service is our first priority, how exactly do we find the time to also make information available?

While I don’t have a good answer for the “how” question, I’ve realized that making resources available both internally and externally is worth the time. Why? It all comes back to user service:

  • Users feel better served if geeks can answer their questions more readily.
  • Geeks feel more empowered if they know they have (or can find) information.
  • Users feel less helpless in a crisis if they can find an update faster (or know where to look).

I’m still trying to figure out how to train everyone to look in the developed resource repositories (namely the intranet for the users and the knowledgebase for the geeks), but I’m a little more satisfied that putting the information out there is worth it.

On Transparency, Part II

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My apologies for the 2-week gap; I’ve been developing content for a blog that will launch mid-May.

But on to the subject: transparency. Again. In Part I, I discussed opening up my master project list to my peers and the anxiety that provoked. Now I’ll be talking about transparency inside my own department.

As the head of a (geek) department, I find it sometimes difficult to determine how much information to disseminate to my geeks. Unlike giving information to my peers, this uncertainty is not motivated by my fears. The primary reason I find it tough to figure out how much info to share within IT is that I read too much.

I’ve read articles on transparency and agreed with them. I’ve read articles on information overload and agreed with them. I’ve seen staff who drop out of meetings because they “just don’t need to know” and the information would confuse them or increase their stress levels. I’ve seen other staff completely frustrated by lack of information about what’s going on in other parts of the department. What’s a geek leader to do?

I don’t think there is an easy answer to that one. In my last department, we were small and seated all in the same area. At least once each day, we’d end up congregating at the Lit Support Specialist’s cube right outside my office. We would chat about anything and everything, ranging from childhood memories to weekend plans to current and upcoming projects. This worked well for us.

My current department, however, is twice as big and very spread out. We often congregate in the Help Desk area, but usually not the entire team together. I eventually realized (thanks to some rather gigantic “hints”) that the casual method of information sharing that worked at my last firm wasn’t going to fly at my current one.

So I started having weekly 30-minute meetings. I moved these meetings from the training room to the Help Desk area, since the Help Desk folks were having trouble making it on time and staying. After trying a few different times, we settled on a time when most of the firm was at lunch so the phones weren’t quite as continuous.

At some of these meetings, I do most of the talking. For example, when I started a new change management procedure, we spent most of the time talking about that. At other meetings, we go around the room and each person talks about his or her current projects or issues. Each geek shares as much as he pleases or tunes out if he doesn’t want to know. They have access to my master project list (the live document) and can question anything they please. (Somehow, this doesn’t cause me any fear. This is probably a good thing.)

We’re still trying to get to the appropriate level of granularity, since not all my staff talks to each other often enough to disseminate solutions to specific problems. I have to admit that I find that frustrating, since a 30-minute meeting is only long enough for brief discussions. But we’re getting better.

I have to wonder, though, if there’s ever a “perfect” level of internal transparency. If so, anyone know what it is?