The unpredictability of IT demands is the main critical factor in the computational area of modern organizations. These include unforeseen bugs in systems, network infrastructure failures — whose causes take time to be discovered —, wasted time with rework, among many other challenges that culminate in delayed project delivery deadlines or delivery outside the planned service level.
To give you an idea, according to a recent survey by Teamquest, technology professionals face, on average, 8 unforeseen problems per week. Also according to the study, each of these problems mobilizes at least 7 employees for 3 hours. Can you imagine the level of loss caused by the lack of predictability in managing these demands?
But how then to optimize the IT team‘s time, reducing costs, increasing the efficiency and motivation of the professionals involved? Thinking about these mishaps inherent to the area, we have listed some essential tips to make your team much more competitive and efficient. Let’s get to them:
Remodel (or implement) demand management mechanisms:
- Improve internal communication within the organization through weekly meetings with the entire IT department and, if possible, with members of other areas, in order to have a full grasp of the problems faced by other professionals regarding the IT infrastructure. Knowing your customers’ needs is also fundamental to optimizing your team’s service level;
- Separate demands by different types of services offered (networks, system maintenance, software updates, hardware, etc.) based on a priority hierarchy;
- Collect permanent data to support statistical studies that explain where, why, how, when, and what usually goes wrong in your work routine. Historical series, predictive performance measures, average studies. All this observation work can increase the level of predictability regarding problems, improving your results without impacting costs.
Empowerment and task delegation as a prerequisite for fast decision-making
Anyone who works with IT knows that the response time to a problem must be immediate, much like a police squad defusing a time bomb. Lost time is lost productivity, it is an increase in the marginal cost of maintaining each employee, it is the devaluation of the IT team in the eyes of the CEO.
For all these reasons, it is necessary to let go of centralization and delegate tasks to other professionals in the sector, allowing them to also make certain operational decisions without always having to resort to the CIO.
In addition, it is highly recommended to designate part of your team (according to the average volume of demands) to dedicate themselves in a specialized way to solving system failures and other routine problems of an operational scope.
Use a monitoring and fault management system
Dealing with contingencies implies anticipating the future. It is taking a step towards the proactive solution of demands, before they consolidate and end up impacting deadlines and schedules. To this end, it is essential to have the aid of automated systems monitoring tools, capable of quickly identifying errors and overloads, giving professionals more time to respond to find solutions without compromising the company’s productivity.
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