Books on IT (not Project) Management

bangpath asks: "I realize that many of my peers aspire to become managers in their field/respective subfields, but upon visiting Amazon and Barnes & Noble, I noticed a significant lacking in books about IT management. That is, most books that came up under this search were IT project management or IT systems management. Surely, these are important areas that an IT manager deals with frequently, but what about dealing with the people, policy, and responsibilities of IT? One would think that IT workers aren't the same as HR people, or Accountants, or the other types of people you'd find in a typical office. Can anyone recommend any books specifically about managing IT Professionals?"

Comments

Some pointers

[Twylite]

Any book on IT project management that doesn't cover human resources and project-related procedures and policies isn't worth its weight in water. Many IT activities are (or should be) approached as projects, even upgrades or security or policy changes. For those that aren't (such as routine administration), HR management should be no different from management of other employees: define their job and expect performance.

The responsibilities of IT management should be in your job description. Failing which you shouldn't have got into the position without having a passing knowledge. Your best source of information is in books on Information Systems, which will cover the necessity of IT to business, and the requirements to deliver IT/IS in a manner that supports business. Never forget that IT/IS is a support function.

Policies and procedures are perhaps the most difficult to tackle. It is important to remember that books only form a guidelines - you must tailor the policies for your business. Policies often fail because someone got a list from somewhere and tried to implement it, without understanding the needs of their business.

It is especially important to know what your policies are intended to achieve. Are you trying to make a process faster? More formal and requiring independant approval? More secure? ISO-9000 compliant? Less legally problematic? Start with knowing the goal, then work back to the process.

A quick search on Google and Amazon produced a list of potential titles: "IT Manager's Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done", "The IT Survival Guide", "Foundations of Service Level Management", "IT Policies & Procedures: Tools & Techniques That Work (3rd Edition)", "Information Security Policies, Procedures, and Standards: Guidelines for Effective Information Security Management", "Best Practices in Policies and Procedures", "Establishing a System of Policies and Procedures".

I don't know anything about these books -- they just look like suitable starting points

I am always amazed by the tendency of managers to think of IT people as "different" when it comes to management. This is simply not true. At a push one may point out that most IT people are highly qualified, and that highly qualified people are more mobile and less likely to accept poor working conditions. But the basic principles of HR management apply to ALL employees.

Peopleware

[denisb]

This book should definitely be in an IT managers bookshelf ..

Peopleware

Yes, it is specific to software project management, but goes deeper, and applies to generic management of technical personell aswell.

Managing Einsteins

[haplo21112]

Amazon Link
Highly Recommended.

IT management is an awfully big topic...

[PinglePongle]

IT management is made up of many disciplines - some technical, some financial, some project-based, and some people-based.

I'm a development manager, and there are a handful of books which I think stand out in those disciplines, but I know of only 2 which cover my role specifically : "Leading a Software Development Team" by Richard Whitehead (which I have not yet read), and "Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers" by by J. Hank Rainwater, which I've started and looks pretty good. You could also try "The Manager Pool" - again, mostly about development teams - or "Software for your head".

I agree that "Peopleware" is an absolute must - it's focussed on managing development teams rather than system administrators or helpdesk staff, but a lot of the principles apply to pretty much any kind of team.

On the whole, though, I'd suggest you look for books related to the specific disciplines you are interested in, and grab some stuff from the general business literature shelf - "Finance for non-financial managers", and "Influence" have both helped me enormously !

IT Organization

[lwbecker2]

There is a book on the O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf (free trial available)called IT Organization : Building A World Class infrastructure. While not 100% devoted to your topic of interest, some sections from the Table of Contents seem like they may help you.

Good luck.

Re:There's some of this stuff in Limoncelli and Ho

[TilJ]

I'll second this. It's one of the best IT "best practices" books I've seen, and the authors are hang out on the SAGE (http://www.sage.org) mailing list - which is a group you should be involved with if you're interested in IT management issues.