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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.
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 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
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.
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
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.
The phrase I hear a lot is "actionable decision-quality information." If the executive has to ask "what does this mean to me and the company", you're presenting too much raw data. It's not filtered enough, cooked down and crystallized. Really, if you understand something of the business goals the execs are working towards, you'll know you've distilled the technical data enough if you feel like you can make the business decision with that data.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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?
Want some fish with that chip on your shoulder?
You horde your information because experience tells you that when you share it, bad things happen.
You always give a bullshit answer, because you've been nailed to the wall before because something that you thought to be the case turned out to be wrong, and, in the meantime, the phb you told that poisonous factoid to, turned around and told everyone up the food chain, and now YOU have to find a way to make something happen, which you've just learned is impossible.
If upper management wants open, clear, and honest answers, they need to understand the complexity of the question, and the reality that expensive problems can crop up in routine-seeming tasks.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.