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Reporting To Executives
chopsuei3 writes "As a System Administrator, I am charged with providing more insight into the functioning of the system. What types of reports and information do other System Administrators submit to executives and on what frequency? Measurements such as uptime and average page latency are useful, but our site is relatively stable and we see minimal downtime, so I'm looking for other important and useful information I can report up to better illustrate my efforts. Our system is also unique in that about 70% of the traffic we see is from devices and not human browsers. I am a lone System Administrator in a 20-person company which specializes in web-based irrigation management. I also simultaneously perform all IT-related tasks in the office, which may also be important to report up to executives on regular basis."
Dear Slashdot, How do I do my job? Sincerely, Chop Suey
how about asking them what they want to see? Prepare a short document listing what information you can provide them and in what format, and ask them what they want to see. How often, what detail, etc.
I know, I know. Talking to people, particularly executives, is a daunting task for some in the IT world, but you'd be amazed at how much easier things become when you ask people what they want.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Numbers and stats are nice and all, but beyond the headline numbers, your job is to give an executive summary. Here is what I've been doing. These things are working well. These are improvements that I am targeting or hope to target. Here are the unique challenges (you described one) and risks that we face and how I plan to deal with them.
I'm not a system administrator, but I don't see how the above is any different no matter what your job description.
"What types of reports and information do other System Administrators submit to executives and on what frequency?"
TPS reports, of course!
Now bring on the Redundant Mod!
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Start out your presentation stating that you're willing to dive as low as the executives ask you to but you're going to give them a high level view. Have slides after the end of your presentation as backup to support this claim. Keep large numbers of systems generalized with figures next to them to let the executives know how many devices or users you're supporting. Include meaningful statistics like 'requests per hour' to give them a good hint of how capable your system is.
If you're briefing one or two executives, see if you can pull up their calendar for the past few months and see what kind of meetings they've been in. If anything overlaps with what you're presenting do not brief the same thing twice. If you have multiple executives, tailor your presentation to the top one or two in importance. Nobody wants their time wasted with something they've already seen.
If they want a low level view, you might put together an example story of the flow of information from the sprinkler A all the way back to your server and the response back with all the challenges faced along the way. Keep it interesting, uncluttered and as simple as possible unless further questions are asked.
If you've got budget, pick up the three Edward Tufte books on The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information & Visual Explanations. Read them and incorporate that sort of data presentation into your reports.
Another great thing is if you can get interesting metrics established and defined and then develop scripts to ingest this information automatically into weekly reports (think of a perl script that digests very large log files). Have them create a cover sheet with the most general metrics and convert it to PDF or whatever the execs prefer to view them in. If you've got time, tailor them to the specific reader (your CTO is going to be interested in different things than your CEO or marketing director).
My work here is dung.
Operations is a bottom-line game. It really comes down to how you're providing the service at the lowest possible cost.
I'd suggest trying to plan and execute projects that will bring down the hardware cost per user (ie, start compiling PHP. That could drive down cpu-cost-per-user).
It sounds annoying, but really that is the math game. Identify cost per user, cost per hit, cost per account or some other metric that management will understand, and then work to push that cost down.
Report on those efforts.
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better illustrate my efforts.
Presenting executives with log files, or web stats is no way to communicate with your boss. This will give him/her an idea of the work the server is doing, but not you. You might want to present your to-do lists. These to-do lists should include completed and incomplete tasks. Since it is a small company and you are the only SA, you might try to attend the companies planning meetings. Be a part of the company instead of just an employee and you won't have to worry about CYA all the time.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
I do reporting and give that to executives. I ask then what numbers they want and also why. The question as to why will imply that they will take action at certain points. It does not mean that I change the numbers, it means that I have some insight in what they want.
Asking them will explain what is important to them. That could be completely the opposite of what you think they would think is important. Uptime might not be important if all your downtime is outside of office hours.
Also look at what your own goals are.
However do not give them more then 3 or max 4 numbers. They won't understand and will not know what to do with it. Save details for the quartely meetings. I have made so many reports onn request where they say: what are the numbers for XYZ and each time I ask them: what will you do if they are good/bad?
There is no reason in measuring things where there will follow no actions due to those numbers.
Also be prepared to answer questions that you can not explain or are very hard to defend. "Why is the uptime not 100%? That is what we pay you for."
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I don't mean to sound flippant or like a cocky IT jerk but they really have no idea what you're talking about. You'll have to translate it into terms they can understand.
In my company, the issue we're looking at is trying to quantify the value of IT. What management does not understand it devalues. So there's a bunch of geeks in a room doing shit. But what does it mean for the bottom line? Just filing reports on trouble tickets doesn't do the job. One ticket could be for showing a person where their start menu disappeared to and another could represent an continuing problem that took a hundred hours of work to resolve.
Staying until 2am to fix a problem in the server room doesn't count for diddly if all anyone sees of you in public is you being rude to a secretary for losing her word icon. That's all that will be remembered.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The only executive who would be meaningfully impressed with technical metrics would probably be in your direct up-chain (e.g., CTO), so tailor those metrics towards their concerns. Things like performance measures that allow you to spot trends ("Is it me, or do those new servers crash more often?") and predict future necessary action ("Are we nibbling into our system resource reserve? Time to budget for upgrades.").
Outside of geek-ville, measure stuff which translates into business terms. Compute uptimes and responsiveness and scale transaction measurements against sales, or eyeballs, or whatever your company is really about.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Why don't you ask the executives what information is important to them? They are your customer so you need to gather their requirements, not ours. Once you know what questions they want answered, you can then generate reports that answer them.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
Focus on the benefits the systems provide for the business. For example, if you were sysadmin for a website of a major airline, you would focus on the amount of tickets sold online. Management is way more interested in seeing how much money the web site makes, or in what ways it helps people do their job better and more efficient, than purely technical data like system/service uptime or page visits.
It's always heartwarming to see a Sysadmin ascend to the point where they begin to slowly realize that justification for their salary is going to have to involve some lying.
Collect the amount of water pumped reported by each sensor as a trace between 9:30 AM and 4PM on the days the market is open. Find the correlation between this trace and the S&P500 index with a two minute time lag. See which sensor has a correlation coefficient more than 0.05. Use that info to come up with a trading strategy to buy and sell the exchange traded fund IVV. Propose a project find the leading indicator sensor for more securities like QQQQ, Diamond, XLF, XLU, XLV, XLP and the stock ANSS. Upper management is mostly made up of idiots who fall for such things. Build an empire under you. Watch the cash flow of the company. Just before it goes bust, put all this experience in a resume and get a job in the ultra high speed trading division of Morgan Stanley.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is a one-off idea, but you could meet with marketing and ask for a list of the various campaigns they've launched over the past year. Then you could parse the web server logs to see where traffic was coming from during the dates of those campaigns. It would give execs a metric by which to measure the effectiveness of the marketing efforts. This is important, because as your ship sinks, the execs will look to you for help in determining the ballast that needs to be dumped.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
A previous manager I had was always asking me different kind of numbers. I knew that manager did absolutely nothing with those numbers and also had no clue what I was talking about.
So one day I said that those numbers would take two days to retrieve. I then made up some numbers that looked like they could be correct and presented those while doing nothing during two days.
Absolutely nothing happened. I would not be surprised if that manager did not even looked at my fiction. Luckily now I have a manager who asks me what would be important numbers for his goals (which he explained) AND he is not afraid of bad numbers as they must be used to explain budged for staffing, upgrades, ...
"What do you want to achieve with the numbers?" is one of the first questions I ask. I and he know that numbers are statistics and can be presented in different ways without being wrong.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
be brief, be gone.
That's about the best I can give you.
Your whole summary should fit on 1 sheet of paper, with bullet points.
The whole presentation should take less than 3 minutes.
Ask yourself, if you were flying at 30,000' over your operation, "What would I see?"
That's what the execs want.
15 person company needs 1 CEO and that is it. if the CEO cant manage 14 people then he is a incompetent idiot.
One Competent CEO with 4 competent staff below him can easily, EASILY manage a company of that size. Idiots that hand out titles like candy are incompetent, be wary of a small start up with all executive staff.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I used to work for a head of department who demanded all sorts of printed monthly reports and would start getting on people's backs if it was late. Not only was it a boring time drain but it wasn't difficult to see that they didn't really know what the reports meant but weren't prepared to admit it. So for three months I handed in the same report with the headline date on the first page changed, on the fourth month I didn't hand in my reports and, when taken to task about it, took them aside and showed them the last three months reports I had haded in and the real data I had kept back. Fortunately I managed to get out of that company but I didn't produce any more routine reports after that.
Stupid flounders!
I started working at an organization a while back and I would file a trouble ticket whenever I came across something broken, even if it was unimportant and with an overflowing workload might not be done for a while. A manager was hired after a while who decided to use the trouble ticket system as a meter of progress for tasks done. When he announced this, I immediately closed all of these types of tickets, saved them locally on my machine, and even went into the database so as to delete all vestiges of these tickets. I began only creating tickets when I knew a task would probably be done on-time and quickly. The manager was canned after about two years there - the thing that saved him for so long is that his manager changed three times while he was there, the third one axed him.
What management wants to see is that their investment in you is getting results. If they spend X amount of dollars on something, they want to see how it is helping the company or whatever. Show how successful your projects have been, how your uptime rate is always increasing etc. Use lots of colorful charts, lists with 20 goals and "accomplished" next to 18 of them and "partially accomplished" next to the other two. That type of crap. I mean, if management wants this nonsense from the sysadmin, you're in Dilbert land already.
In France in 1968 there was a massive general strike, with workers taking over factories and the like, and De Gaulle even planned contingencies to leave France and invade it at some future point with the French army and possibly NATO support. One of the wall posters of that time said "The boss needs you, you don't need the boss". Sometimes I think these exercises are more to psychologically mess with you than anything. You do all the work and create all the wealth, the bosses and shareholders don't do anything and collect salaries and profits. By making you do a pointless exercise like this to justify yourself to them, they're putting the idea out of your head of the reverse - of why *they* are necessary to the company. After 13 years in this industry, I'm becoming convinced that the dumb, pointless things management makes you do does have some strange psychological point along these lines. I've quit agreeing with my co-workers that these presentations are dumb and pointless, I think they do have a point - keeping us disciplined, from requesting sane hours and on-call rotation and all of that.
how about asking them what they want to see?
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I know, I know. Talking to people, particularly executives, is a daunting task for some in the IT world, but you'd be amazed at how much easier things become when you ask people what they want.
Ask?!? Actually asking a question is verboten in IT! First, you have spend meaningless hours researching the question and finding your own answers and then, after exhausting all of your options, then, and only then, can you go and ask a question.
If you don't follow those steps in that order, you will get a snarky condescending answer of "What? You couldn't google it?!" or some other asinine statement. Or the fact that admitting ignorance in IT is equated with stupidity.
It's really awkward when you have to report to someone who's not in IT and they ask "Why couldn't you have just asked in the first place?" It so hard to explain the childish and retarded social dynamics of IT to folks who act on an adult level.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Is the average manager able to understand the type of information a systems administrator is able to provide? Or, put otherwise, is a systems administrator able to provide the information that a manager can understand? I think we have an issue here.
no, I don't have a sig
There's your first mistake. No, providing more insight is not what you're doing. Your job is to:
Everything else about any reports you fill in for them is just incidental.
Go grab a copy of Dilbert and read it in the can (might as well do it on company time). That's the real world.
Show how the various systems and services directly support Business operations and overall goals like profitability, customer service ratings, etc..
Point out wherever technology is a business hindrance or obstacle, and provide multiple options for systems or software integration to alleviate the problem.
In short, use the opportunity to remind the execs that IT is more than a cost-center, and how its proper usage can enhance profitability.
Careful though; if you do too good a job, they might make you a (gasp) manager, and then of course, you are screwed.
You work for a 20 person company that has executives and reports? What kind of company is this? My experience (as a sys admin and with simultaneous IT support) has taught me that reports are for shareholders' piece of minds unless you work for a really large company. And if you're a private company then the shareholders are the partners/founders and you should just talk to them like as needed.
If you are concerned about supporting the reasoning behind the existence of your job, it is time to depart.
Never a better time than moving now, the job market is BOOMING...
PERL is Perl, and not an acronym! Or do you write PERL on your Apple MAC?
Practical Extraction and Report Language?
Yeah, I know, it's written Perl. I write too many reports with too many acronyms to care anymore.
On another note, does the increase in the use of automatic spell checkers make you feel all sad inside? What I mean is, after losing your main hobby and apparently sole purpose in life, I could see you getting depressed.
I've worked in large and small companies, and the one unifying truth of executive communication is that they do not want details. In their mind, they hired you to take care of the details, If you say you need $100,000 to increase bandwidth at remote locations, you had better have a one or two sentence explanation about how this is going to make them money or help them make money. If they want to see a utilization chart or two, have that ready, but you're going to be tuned out if you launch into a long explanation.
I'm not an MBA, but my guess would be that they teach MBAs to focus on strategy and leadership, and to hire people to do the nuts-and-bolts work. Same goes for small business owners, but double -- they're doing crazy 120 hour weeks growing the business - why would they want to listen to a report from the guy they hired to make sure they wouldn't have to deal with "all that IT stuff?"
As long as you keep that in mind, reports to executives will go well. Short, simple, money- or productivity-focused explanations, very little technical information, etc. Think like they are thinking -- "Why am I paying for this?" "How does this make me money or keep me from losing money?"
Staying until 2am to fix a problem in the server room doesn't count for diddly if all anyone sees of you in public is you being rude to a secretary for losing her word icon. That's all that will be remembered.
An excellent point, and one which most IT folks fail to comprehend.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The problem is, especially with suits, is that what they want probably isn't in the same galaxy, let alone ballpark, as what they need or what they can use.
Right. They're all a bunch of idiots and got where they are by sheer incompetence. Almost makes sense... I'm sure you understand their job better than they do - after all, engineers like you and me know everything right?
The upshot is once you get that report all nice and automated they'll ask you for the exact same report three months later having entirely forgotten its existence. Don't tell them they've been getting that report daily/weekly already for the last three months. They don't like that for some reason.
Gee, wonder why they might not like a condescending answer...
Perhaps the reason they don't like your answer is found more in how you tell them than what you tell them.
Dude, just slap together some random figures like the number of occupied inodes in your hard disk -- they are executives after all, what do you expect them to understand about technical stuff?
You do realize that the single most common undergraduate degree among S&P 500 CEOs is Engineering right? Over 20% of them have an undergrad degree in engineering. And of course not having a formal degree in the subject must mean they are an technologically illiterate. After all, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates never even graduated college so how could they possibly know anything about "technical stuff". Good thing we have smart guys like you to explain it to them.
Your arrogance really sounds like ignorance to me.
I give a report every quarter. This most recent quarter report is outlined below. I'm not sure if it will be useful to you, but I have found that If I can explain to the executives in terms they understand why they pay me, they generally feel more inclined to do so in the future.
I put these in financial terms because if you convert this qualitative data (like what you do) into nice easy-to-understand quantitative data (like monetary sums) executives will be able to understand your job and your priorities better.
Summary of Previous Quarter (aka What I did, and why you paid me for it)
- Illustrate changes made to the architecture/infrastructure
Current Status (aka Aren't you glad you hired me to worry about all this)
- Make qualitative data quantitative, so it can be compared to previous quarters
- Group broad technical concepts together into categories that can easily be weighed in terms of risk/benefit ratios
ex: security, infrastructure, storage, architecture, auditing/reporting, backups, disaster recovery
- Include the effects to the overall business (the 30,000 ft/km view)
Expense Report (aka How much I really cost)
-What you spent, where you spent it (again, encouraged to stick to broad categories ex: software, hardware, security, training)
Incident Reports (aka Why you don't pay me enough)
-Document incidents, illustrated how they were resolved, what was learned, and what measures were taken to prevent them from occurring in the future
-Though painful, its generally good to point out your grievous errors here as well
Next Quarter (aka Why you're going to keep paying me)
-Make sure you know where your executives priorities are in terms of Availability/Reliability/Security/Cost and make goals for the next quarter
Hope this helps
Having a bad day?
Alrighty, I AM a CTO of a 20 person company with a single admin and here is what I'm interested in.
1 - problems and their resolution
2 - potential issues
3 - time sinks.
So I get info on:
What broke last week and how did we fix it: a list of hardware software outages, their root causes, the fix applied, whether that fix is a long term of short term fix, if short term, a recommendation for a long term solution
Issues that my admin sees as 'near term' problems (2 months): list of systems low on resources (disk, cpu, ram, ...), applications that have repeat issues, upgrades that are due and are non trivial (potential downtime, critical app where the 'upgrade gone wrong' may lead to down time, ...), etc. This includes a list of any planned downtime and a description of the planned downtime (including 'the plan'/timetable of events) so I can remind or co-ordinate with others.
Issues that my admin sees as 'mid term' problems (12 months): list of systems due for replacement, applications/OSes that are near end of life, need for additional hardware (network switches, firewall upgrades, ...), etc
Any single issue that he spent more than an hour on or anything he is repeatedly spending time on, those are my definition of time sink.
Why am I interested in those specific items:
Items in category 1 are apt to come up in conversation with my boss. They are also items I need to monitor to ensure that the systems, applications, and yes the admin staff, are not causing the company headaches.
Items in categories 2 and 3 fall into planning and budget issues that I need to plan for, or co-ordinate with others.
Category 3 also allows me to eventually understand that application A or staff member B or 'department' C are killing us and I need to find a better way for the company to work. It also allows me a better understanding of whether the week is an anomaly or if I need additional admin staff or training.
None of this is in a rigid format, so no I can't forward you a template :). It is currently done via office visits/conversations, emails, and hallway conversations. That is working and I see no need for a more rigid structure unless we start to have communications issues. When we do, I'll setup a more formal status reporting system (currently, if it ain't broke ...).
Bottom line, in a small company, single admin case where that admin reports to the CTO, the CTO is effectively the systems/IT manager as well as the development manager, the CTO or corporate level planner, and the executive level consultant/evangelist on IT matters to the CEO and CFO. I do NOT necessarily expect the admin to be an IT manager, being an admin is frequently hard enough. However, that 'department' is not my only concern so to some extent the admin needs to summarize stuff and not ship me logs/raw data, I have too many hats.
Does that help?
I read the post, yes.
I outlined the utility of reports.
If his boss was wasting peoples' time he should have went to his boss's boss. What he did instead was lie. Lying is bad. By falsifying data in the report, whatever utility in the report existed is gone.
I have assigned reports as a task to ensure that the task gets done yes. I find it reasonably effective, especially when I don't have the time to do my own day to day inspection of work. I myself have also found problems when I have produced reports that I know will likely not be viewed. But I did find problems. And this was entirely due to having done an actual inspection that was required by the report spec.
I don't really consider myself a techie, that is true. I began programming around 1980 on a TRS 80 model 3. I wrote video games in basic. I didn't get back into programming until the early 90's doing database stuff in Paradox for DOS. My latest IT job has been intranet programming in Perl, and MySQL.
I also have an MBA in Entrepreneurship, with a Certificate in Business Ethics. My focus was on ethical strategies for new business development and re-engineering. I'm the turnaround guy that can come into a company and tell you what is going wrong, provide you with a new business strategy, and give you a list of the people you should hire and fire.
The report may have been pointless. However, it was not for the one producing the report to decide. It was between his boss and his bosses boss. If there was a problem it should have been made known to upper management so they could remove the report.
Management may have been incompetent, but this was malice. This was intentional deception of management to serve a personal interest.
When it comes to reports, always itemize the things you work, who requested them, when they requested, when you completed it, and the amount of effort (in term of time and collaboration with other teams) that it took you, including the time it takes you to create the report (seriously.) The first goal is to cover your behind. A report like that will show what you are doing.
The second goal is to, without much effort, have a report in a format (.i.e excel) such that you can do your own analysis. Which employee requests the most crap from you - this will also get you which department represents the bulk of your work, and which systems generate the most work. To the report, add an addendum for extreme circumstances (.ie. it took me an additional 12 hours to recover the site because there was a network failure between us and the DBA servers.).
Surprisingly, it doesn't take that much effort. All you do is keep a spreadsheet in which you log each request you receive, when you started working on it, and when you finish it. Format it well enough (or use a mickey mouse db like Access), and you can create a quick and simple report with a snap of your fingers.
Beware, though, of expending too much time trying to get the perfect reports. If it's taking you too much time, stop. The idea is to report a general ball park figure of things.
Now, if they are trying to micromanage you into daily reports with hourly entries, simply tell them that you will report 1 to 1.5 hours of effort devoted to the reporting task. After a few days, they'll back out very quickly.
Yes, according to the poster, it was not used for anything. However, the one that requested the report has not spoken as to its utility. All we have as proof of it being used by the manager is the word of someone who admitted falsifying reports. Granted, the admission was meant to be commiseration, so the act of falsifying reports may have been overstated, but the act was stated nonetheless. And as I said in this thread, the report has many uses, some of which are meant purely for the report producer.
And even if the report were truly not being used for anything at all (the employee being in no position to judge), that does not grant the employee the right to go maverick. One works for someone or one works for oneself, not both.
This is a great question, you’re at the same point in your career as me.
You need to report on the metrics that measure your departments performance, these are monetary values and I know they may be difficult to measure and it’s not accept to suggest the business wouldn’t run with the IT group. Although this statement is true, it doesn’t address the department’s performance.
Try breaking up what you do for the company into Service Desk, Service Support and Change Management. The number of helpdesk enquiries has value to the business, they’d pay maybe $10-$50 per call if an outside desk was used and even more if administrator would be involved and you’re saving the company money.
Maintenance work in a Service Support role and managing system changes could be related to the cost for a contractor and the reduced cost of running the system versus additional revenue generated by the users to determine how much you’re saving the company money.
That’s the small stuff, now work out (with the other departmental/divisional managers) how much of *their* department relies on IT and relate that proportional of their revenue to the value you support for the company. Especially important to look at sales staff if they use a CRM tool that you support.
If all else fails remember it’s how much your department supports the production side to do or enhance their job that counts then second is the cost you incur on the company.
Regards Sinesurfer A Nerd is someone who lives for technology, A Geek is someone who lives for technology and loves it