Ask Slashdot: How Do You Prove an IT Manager Is Incompetent?

An anonymous reader writes "I have been asked by a medium-sized business to help them come to grips with why their IT group is ineffective, loathed by all other departments, and runs at roughly twice the budget of what the CFO has deemed appropriate for the company's size and industry. After just a little scratching, it has become quite clear that the 'head of IT' has no modern technological skills, and has been parroting what his subordinates have told him without question. (This has led to countless projects that are overly complex, don't function as needed, and are incredibly expensive.) How can one objectively illustrate that a person doesn't have the knowledge sufficient to run a department? The head of IT doesn't necessarily need to know how to write code, so a coding test serves no purpose, but should be able to run a project. Are there objective methods for assessing this ability?"

Comments

OMG, John is that you?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe you submitted this to Slashdot!

Re:OMG, John is that you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent point 'jcaplan',

I have read exactly 10 or 12 of these posts and I am an IT Manager, not a laywer.

If the CFO feels things are wrong it should have been a done deal, your work is just CYA so prepare some documentation citing various associations and academics and present your report/excuses for the CFO to do what she wants to do. Axe the pointy headed IT Manager.

Don't forget to double your consulting costs through extras and be sure to recommend a junior insider with merit as a replacement. He will readily agree to sign off on the extras a few months down the road, based on merit of course!

P.S. - Do not cite Slashdot, I will deny everything.

   

Circular logic

[Carewolf]

He is the IT manager because he is incompetent, or possibly incompetent because he is the IT manager. Not sure which comes first but they always follow.

I'm not a manager, but...

[geminidomino]

IANAM, but the simple pseudo-code I came up with would probably work.

for each job responsibility
          if !manager.capable(responsibility) then
                        ++strikes;

if strikes > threshold
          new CafeteriaCashier(manager);

Re:I'm not a manager, but...

[ameen.ross]

The only problem is that usually
// Usually the people who get the management jobs are brother-in-law, nephew, schoolbuddy etc. of the CEO.
set threshold to 9999

How do you get the idiot consultant off my back?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Hi I am the head of IT of a midsize company and the management has called in this consultant. He is convinced my pointy haired bosses that my budget is twice the size and I an too naive and gullible and merely parrot my staff's opinions to the management. This consultant is so incompetent he is asking for advice in slashdot. How do I get him off my back, and demonstrate his incompetence to the PHBs?

Re:How do you get the idiot consultant off my back

[L4t3r4lu5]

You're the IT Manager. You grep the traffic logs for hits on the Slashdot.org story submission form and you associate that with the originating internal IP which was assigned to the consultants laptop on the ouside agency / guest VLAN.

Wait, why am I having to tell you this? Holy shit, they're both right; It's incompetency all the way down!

Re:Why not

[Belgaren]

RFC1149 has been deprecated by RFC2549.
RFC1149 has been adapted to IPv6 by RFC6214.