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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?"
I can't believe you submitted this to Slashdot!
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.
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);
You must be a techie. The coding kind.
Head of IT doesn't really need to know that much tech. His blind trust in his underlings might be an issue, but lack of technical skills is not really an issue.
What they lack is manager level (paywise) position for Solution Architect - or just good old fashioned software process, like Scrum .
Sounds far better than a couple of managers I've had. One asked for our advice, which we duly gave, and he ignored, going with a contractor's more-expensive and convoluted suggestions every time - he was sideways transferred when it became apparent that he was getting kickbacks from this contractor. The next manager asked us for options, which we duly gave, and a recommendation as to which we thought was best and it's reasons, and so he chose the cheapest each time, regardless of budget... I then left when they gave the control of the IT department to the HR manager, after that IT manager quit.
... wait, what?
Take IT out of the equation. How do you prove any department head is incompetent?
The company should set specific goals for it. If the manager cannot meet them, demote him or let him go. It's really that simple. Be sure to include specific documentation requirements. If this guy or gal has bad project management skills, they won't be able to show what the department is doing. Be clear that things must improve or else. Give them a chance, but be firm.
You could also enact some form of employee survey in that department. Have folks turn them into HR with no repercussions. Have managers evaluate employees and employees evaluate their managers. This was done at a previous employer of mine and it was annoying to do but it did show upper management there were communication problems and things did improve. No one was fired, but there was significant training done with a few of the managers.
#1 - Figure out what convinced you that the head of IT is the problem. If you're thoroughly convinced, present those reasons to the business. If you have any reservations about your conclusion, then ask yourself if you really should be as convinced as you are about your conclusion.
#2 - Are you an employee, or a consultant brought in to investigate? Your fear of reprisal might temper how much you say.
#3 - Consider presenting some solutions at the same time you present your analysis. It might soften the blow. It also might leave a better taste in peoples' mouths if you find some nice things to say about the head/department as well.
I expect to be downmodded into oblivion for this, but...
Your best bet it to hire a management consultant to review the practices of your IT department to see where they are failing and and how to correct it.
Not only will you receive a (relatively) unbiased review of the state of your IT department from a third party, it will be coming from an outside source, which will give the report more weight with management even if your internal report reaches the same conclusions.
Head of IT doesn't really need to know that much tech. His blind trust in his underlings might be an issue, but lack of technical skills is not really an issue
There is a minimum level of IT competency that leads to credibility as an IT manager, however ... actual managerial skills? That's all about goals, deadlines, motivation, people, targets, and deliverables (among other things).
The most common metric for managers is project completion - not project satisfaction.
If your manager is consistently meeting their targets and performance objectives, you don't have much recourse - Unless you're at one of the very forward-thinking companies that actually accounts for subordinate satisfaction in managerial performance reviews. Which is unlikely, because even companies that adhere to that philosophy don't generally put it in practice.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
I've been asked to do something as part of my job, have no idea how to do it, can you help me?
Sounds to me like the dimwit submitter is just as incompetent at doing what he's been asked to do as the IT manager.
Which given that and the presupposed IT manager's incompetence suggests its actually the CEO that is the issue at the company.
B players hire C players.
If it's your job to determine what the problem is, you should already have the skills necessary to thoroughly evaluate the situation and communicate your conclusions. If you've already determined that this person is the problem, what is left to assess? If you don't know how to objectively determine that this person is the problem, how have you concluded that this person is the problem? If you don't know how to evaluate someone's competence and can't explain your conclusions to the people who hired you, how can you be qualified to tell this company what's wrong with the department?
If you have to come to Slashdot to ask this question, are you REALLY qualified to help the company come to grips?
While the 'head of IT' and/or some number of IT staff may indeed ill suited to perform their jobs correctly, if I was involved in the situation even if my job wasn't ultimately affected, I'd be really pissed that my department's direction was changed based on the advice of a 3rd party that had to post an Ask Slashdot.
Every IT project needs to save the company money in some way and these savings should be easily quantifiable.
No ROI then no project should be funded
I have seen geeks fall on love with geeky projects that cost a lot of money, seem to have no end and dont do anything for the organization except to show how busy they are
Management consultant does this all the time. It really is a task for somebody focusing on management and organization, not on technology consultant. So call some nice people at a company like Arthur D. Little, McKinsey or similar. Of course, they will charge a lot to sort out this kind of situation.
If you really want to get into management consulting the easy path is typically to toss out all the value words and feelings you may have about the people involved. Don't even think words like "loathed", "ineffective", "parroting" etc. Instead you go to the hard facts. What is the properties of the department? How does it compare to other similar departments? Do they have procedures and routines? What are they? Do they have qualifications in relevant fields? etc. Don't fall in the trap of trying to pin everything on a single person, as this kind of situation is typically part of the culture of the department. The head of the department is a symptom, not the single cause of it all.
Also remember, that those that hired you are probably also responsible for hiring that head of department. Calling him incompetent is roughly the same thing as calling the people who hired him incompetent. Not a good way to build professional relationships or helping people.
Suggest an incredibly expensive, complex project that has no benefit to the organisation. Off the record, of course. Let him take _all_ the credit.
Sigger than your average
By his job description.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Have you checked out if his team are giving him good info? Do you know he's actually over a reasonable budget, or is this just the CFO's opinion? What are his credentials for saying so? Is he hated because he doesn't know what the hell is going on, or because he constantly says no to unreasonable demands from other departments?
We have almost no information here for a fully justified and well reasoned response. For all we know he may well have screwed the CxO's daughter at an Xmas party and he's looking for an excuse to fire the guy.
He either delivers, or he doesn't. If he delivers then he's "Working as intended" and you need to adjust his performance management criteria to better reflect what you need out of him. Hell, he may be working just to fulfil those metrics because they're so out of whack with what he actually is supposed to be doing. My Line Manager almost got me fired because she kept making idiotic decisions without asking for my input, and having to pick up the pieces made me look incompetent. We had a stern chat about "treading on my toes" and she backed off, now we're both less stressful and things work better. Costs less, too.
I started rambling; Apologies for that. I'm trying to say that you don't sound like you have enough information to make this decision. If you don't know how to get that information, you probably should hand this project on to someone who does. It's what HR department exist for.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
Is this not objective proof that a person doesn't have the knowledge sufficient to run a department?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
How Do You Prove an IT Manager Is Incompetent?
You don't. You walk away. That has always been my suggestion whenever someone has to come to a point of having to prove his/her manager is incompetent. OTH, your situation is quite unique because you have been tasked with root-causing an IT department's woes. That is quite a pickle you have there.
"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.
Based on what? Your description of the situation hints to some very interesting, poisonous dynamics within that company. Sounds more like scapegoating that problem solving to me.
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.)
Well, this will also tell me that the subordinates are incompetent either. Subordinates should be competent enough to provide sound technical advice. They might not have the middle-to-upper company view to make IT and enterprise architecture decisions (which can lead to unnecessary complexity at the "macro" level.)
However, and barring significant managerial interference and politics, they should be competent enough to keep things efficient, workable and sufficiently simple within their own silos. Rarely you will ever see a situation as the one described being solely the result of an incompetent IT manager.
One could argue that the "parroting" was in essence supporting what his subordinates were passing to him. True that a manager of IT should be capable to tell from the technical factual to the bullshit, at least from a 10k foot view. But he is also expected to rely on his (supposedly) trustworthy subordinates.
IT manager -> strategy.
subordinate -> tactical.
Doesn't matter how good an IT manager is. If the subordinates are shit, no manager will ever be able to compensate for that (and viceversa.) I'm not saying that the IT manager in question is worthless. I'm saying that if the inherent complexity is due to him parroting what his subordinates passed to him, then the subordinates are shit as well.
SORRY. IT. TAKES. TWO. TO. TANGO.
How can one objectively illustrate that a person doesn't have the knowledge sufficient to run a department?
You are going to have to prove that key (and yet poor) decisions have been made by this person consistently and continuously. Decisions that are/were self-evidently poor ones. Passing/parroting poor decisions all the way up should be enough to illustrate that. The corollary of this, however, is that you will also be demonstrating that incompetence runs vertically deep.
How can you salvage that. I don't know. But if you lay the blame sorely on the IT manager, then you are not solving, you are scape goating.
The head of IT doesn't necessarily need to know how to write code, so a coding test serves no purpose,
No. If you think that, I don't believe you are technically competent to make these kind of evaluations. You might not need to know to develop software with the specific stacks being used. But you have to have some type of development knowledge (either from direct experience as a developer or indirectly as, say, a DBA or network administratior, for example.)
but should be able to run a project.
Here we are conflating the role of head of IT with the one of a project manager. This is ok for small companies, but for mid-size companies and up, you better separate the two. If this mid-size company does n
The Peter Principle is a proposition that states that the members of an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success, and merit, will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability
Hm, interesting. I like the characterization, and perhaps it explains my current employer's angle on promotions: step one is to excel and display mastery of your current responsibilities (the Peter Principle) while step two is to successfully operate at the level the promotion would award. This is especially useful to the employer in that they have such candidates working (or trying to work) at a higher level than they are paid. I don't think this works without step two.
It works even better when the promotion comes with a bonus to compensate for the time the worker "should" have been in the new position (so s/he doesn't feel taken advantage of).
(Interestingly, this step two isn't mentioned on the wikipedia article. Instead, its second corollary, which is basically the beginning of step two, states that training should happen before the promotion. Close, but not necessarily strong enough; knowing duties and being able to satisfactorily perform them are two different things.)
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
It works even better when the promotion comes with a bonus to compensate for the time the worker "should" have been in the new position (so s/he doesn't feel taken advantage of).
Yeah, because this actually happens..
If you can do the job for less, guess what.. you're stuck there. And most likely, a supervisor is going to pat themselves on the back, and showcase to their superiors their "ability" to get subordinates to do more work for less, as an example of their shining managerial skills and beneficence to the company, and also as a good reason why they (not you) should get a raise.
I hate to be such a cynic, but I've seen what I've seen.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Chances are this IT boss is being protected somehow.
I know of one guy who got a new car every time he got a complaint of sexual harassment. He basically bullied the company into coughing up a car by threatening a lawsuit for slander/libel if they didn't make it go away. He gets a new car and the complainer gets fired.
As a consultant you should be thankful you're not in the chain of command.
Please, use your position of safety to be candid and ruthless in your evaluation. Document whatever you can and leave it in the hands of whoever hired you. This director needs sacked.