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Making IT Visible to Management?
frustrated Dilbert asks: "We are a very small IT dept where the manager participates in the day-to-day operation of IT services. The problem is that he almost never talks to upper management and doesn't get involved in the business side until someone gives him a specific project to handle. The result is that IT is considered to be firefighters when things fail, and generally plumbers that fix stuff when other PHBs create new projects. We run all the mission-critical stuff in a line of business that can not work without technology. The IT PHB fails to see which sides of the business we need to support and which are second in line. I end up doing my stuff and a lot of his duties of picking up the direction of the business and making strategic decisions. The company is actually great to work for, but I was not hired (or paid) for teaching my boss to run his shop in addition to tech stuff. He simply wasn't made for it and got promoted into something he can't cope with. I'm getting really tired of having to do management and not get any credit and would love to have him replaced, but I hate having to rat on him too. How can I get a more organized workplace when my boss isn't capable of thinking ahead?"
It is likely that you have a line in your job description that reads 'and other tasks'. Many of us have it. Well, honestly, many of you have it since I helped my boss rewrite the job descriptions of my coworkers and me. This includes educating your boss. Here is the trick, if your boss is an idiot, what makes you think you are not? There are several essential skills needed for management, some skills are more important then others depending on position. These skills are technical skills, managerial skills, personnal skills, and networking (suck up) skills. Your boss has to have some technical skills to manage you, but not as great as you have. His level should be enough to make decent decisions based off the information you give him. He should have better managerial, personnal, and networking skills, but not as good as his boss, who would be offset by lesser technical skills. You discuss your perception with you boss and learn his perspective on things.
On a side note, most IT workers expect for some ungodly reason that their bosses have equal or greater technical skills. My manager has an ETL and BI expert (me), two ERP and business process experts (my cohort and me), several SQL experts (7 of us including me), two EDI experts (my cohort and another guy), two pc experts (another guy and me), web programmer (me), a server expert (me), 3 HR process experts (3 other people), and 9 cobal programmers (don't look at me, I don't do big iron). Add in the fact that he also has 3 records retention technicians, their manager, and two archivists (in the traditional sense), one would get the idea how diverse his staff is. How the hell could he be expected to have this skill set? Now he needed to be educated on how we work in some instances. He viewed script programming easy, yet he had never seen complex scripting for business apps on the web before. It is my job to fix misperceptions that would make his decisions wrong and it is his job to ask for information in my area of expertise before shooting his mouth off.
In God we trust, all others require data.
I hate to plug my own book, but...
1. Read the chapter titled, "Visibility and Perception"
2. Read the "Managing Your Boss" section of the chapter titled, "Being Happy"
3. Hand your boss a copy of the book and ask him to read "Visibility and Perception" and the chapter titled, "A Guide for Technical Managers"
Your question is exactly why we wrote this book.