Transition skills from IT professionals to managers

Original Author: zdnet.com posted by: XO: Views: 112

 

If you thought you knew everything you needed to know in the early stage, you would never have been an IT manager. How can you transition from an IT professional to an IT manager? The skills described by this experienced professional below should help you avoid many mistakes.

The transition from a pure technician to an IT manager is a long road full of hardships and twists and turns. Steven Crane, who has been working in the IT industry for 16 years, has a deep understanding of this. He has been an IT manager for eight years in some strong companies (such as Gillette and Parker. During that period, he successfully met many management challenges. In order to help new IT managers avoid repeating the mistakes he had made in the past, he introduced 15 skills based on his own experience.

Skills for building management skills

1. Read the "one-minute manager" series by Ken Blanchard. According to Ken Blanchard's definition in the book, the so-called one-minute manager refers to the manager who can achieve good results by applying three simple management steps without a long time.

2. Understand the rules and regulations of your company and establish good relationships with your colleagues and superiors. Listen carefully to their suggestions. Managers are usually willing to help other managers.

3. Discover and understand your weaknesses and shortcomings as soon as possible. Remember, you can make up for your shortcomings through training.

4. Learn to minimize the budget so that you can clearly understand where the funds are saved.

Enhanced communication skills with company supervisors

5. Do not report the problems encountered in daily work to your superiors. On the contrary, be good at discovering repeated problems and finding solutions for them. Then, ask for advice from superiors on several different solutions.

6. If your project is as good as support, you must separate the two work zones. As long as the salaries of new employees are calculated within the cost of the entire project, you can recruit new employees for new projects. Do not let your employees be involved in ongoing projects while doing support work.

7. Detailed records and timely reports. Ask the project team members to enter the time record so that you can understand where the time is spent. These records can be helpful when you need to prove that the project duration should be extended. Of course, with these records, you can easily write monthly reports to your company supervisor.

8. When the company system suffers a problem, you need to know that your group's task is to restore the system to normal. Ensure that disaster recovery plans for critical systems are in place and that other projects can be restored.

Tips for motivating employees

9. If the company has no formal service platform agreement before, and you find that a large number of service calls need to be answered in your actual work, you can create a centralized service platform. If necessary, you can seek outsourcing. If outsourcing is required, a service level agreement must be developed.

10. Take the time to motivate your employees to succeed and eliminate as many unfavorable factors as possible from other departments.

11. Learn "monkey management": when an employee asks you for help, let them know how to proceed. Don't help employees share their jobs, because you will find that such jobs can never be done.

12. Perform at least one or two performance evaluations for employees each year. Give employees clear goals and help them achieve their goals.

13. Hold regular group meetings. Since work tasks are always one after another and everyone seems so busy, it is difficult to do so. If absolutely necessary, you can choose the form of work lunch, just don't forget to provide sandwiches for everyone.

14. Invite team members to go out for dinner at least once every quarter. If the budget is well controlled, there is no problem in coping with this consumption.

15. You need to know that the sum of capabilities of all employees is the maximum work output of the entire group. Don't just set yourself up with high standards and hope that all group members will be able to do the same with you. They should be commended and encouraged based on their actual situation and trained on their shortcomings.

Success always comes

Successful management skills help Crane become an independent management consultant. Now, he has helped many small and medium-sized companies plan it e-sales systems and e-commerce service strategies. The skills described above are still helping him.