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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Tell a Compelling Story About IT Infrastructure?
An anonymous reader writes "Every month we submit status reports to upper management. On the infrastructure side, these reports tend to be 'Hey, we met our service level agreements ... again.' IT infrastructure is now a lot like the electric company. Nobody thanks the electric company when the lights come on, but they have plenty of colorful adjectives to describe them when the power is off.
What is the best way to construct a compelling story for upper management so they'll appreciate the hard work that an IT department does? They don't seem particularly impressed with functioning systems, because they expect functioning systems. The extensive effort to design and implement reliable systems has also made IT boring and dull. What types of summaries can you provide upper management to help them appreciate IT infrastructure and the money they spend on the services it provides?"
What is the best way to construct a compelling story for upper management so they'll appreciate the hard work that an IT department does? They don't seem particularly impressed with functioning systems, because they expect functioning systems. The extensive effort to design and implement reliable systems has also made IT boring and dull. What types of summaries can you provide upper management to help them appreciate IT infrastructure and the money they spend on the services it provides?"
give them a system that doesnt function how they want.
When they complain, give them what they want
profit!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Try this one:
Jane felt there were too many cables under her desk so she took her scissors to several of them and cut them back to the floor opening.
Our team successfully ran new cables and got the network up and running in the space of half an hour as well proactively took steps to prevent such an occurrence in the future by tossing Jane out the window.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Why is it that they need to be told a compelling story? Appreciation is nice, yes, but is it necessary for them to be wow-ed in every future report? Like OP said, they expect functioning systems and get functioning systems, and people get mad when things don't work right.
What is the best way to construct a compelling story for upper management so they'll appreciate the hard work that an IT department does?
In my many years of experience none of this will ever change until a mass exodus of the IT department occurs and all the unappreciated talent leaves. And even then executives will probably never be able grasp how good they really had it because they'll be in recovery mode for a minimum of the next 3 years.
The only other situation I've seen is when the CTO is a really charismatic guy who can describe the most simplest of task in the most interesting way and can play enough politics so people kiss his butt to make sure he's happy. Then the CTO tells his underlings how appreciated they are by the executives even though they themselves never thought to say so.
ehm, numbers give them headaches. Use graphs and pictures. And the first slide should be some stock photo with smiling young people that are engaged in something completely unrelated.
Oh and if you report on a project, use a traffic light that is green or use smileys...
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It sounds like you're upset because upper management is treating you like infrastructure, rather than the heroes you are?
You made the point yourself - nobody cheers when the lights come on, they get pissed when they go out. IT SHOULD be boring and dull. To an average person in your company, they shouldn't - EVER - care about how or why their systems work.
Do you think providing electricity isn't a difficult enterprise, requiring a huge number of highly-trained people doing a bunch of things right, 24/7? And I bet, a hundred years ago, people looked at people working in "electricity" the same way people looked at "IT" twenty years ago.
It's not 100 years ago. It's not 20 years ago. And we're not heroes or geniuses. We're plumbers. (Except that we're too dumb to unionize.) If anything, we are incredibly lucky that our uses are satisfied with the - in most cases - poor level of service they receive. Think about it - in all the time you've worked in IT, how many times have you seen the electricity in a building just go out, without explanation? Now, how many times have you seen major server outages, costing more than a million dollars in lost productivity? For me, I have never seen an electrical outage not related to a major disaster that kept everyone out of the building anyway. I have seen at least 5 outages that led to $1m or more in losses - and three of them were for stupid, easily preventible things. (Really? You upgraded both the primary and backup SAN at once, and killed the entire network for six hours when the patch turned out to not run properly?)
Take another look at your question. It's premised on the proposition that IT SHOULDN'T be boring and dull - which I disagree with entirely - and that IT should get more appreciation than it does, which is questionable at best. What's driving you to ask those questions, in that way?
WHY WON'T YOU LOVE ME, CHIEF DADDY OFFICER?
Pay attention to meeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!111111eleven
Don't listen to all these bitter pricks.
Execs know the job of IT is to maintain systems and to increase work-efficiency through collaborative technology.
Instead of being boring "yeah everything fine, piss off" announce internal initiatives and goals that even a commoner can understand. Talk about important milestones or stories of exceptional (and actual) personal achievement. If you track your hours, announce how many man-hours were placed into a particular project. Show me the numbers.
If you fall into that "we work hard" crying bullshit, fuck you. My cat works trying to get that god damn dot with no results. I want to see results that people OUTSIDE OF IT actually like. If you did something that took 5,000 hours and everything sucks and the users don't like it... why did you do it in the first place? That's when the inquisitions start.
How do you tell a compelling story about IT infrastructure?
Once upon a time, there was a filing cabinet. This was no ordinary filing cabinet, for it sat beside a large server rack, and every day it gazed longingly at the shiny, blinking machines and wondered what it was like to be in the cloud storage business.
How's that, OK for a start?
Nice to see someone who gets it. I've been in the IT infrastructure business for many years now, and I think that plumbing, electrical, or another skilled trade is exactly the right analogy.
That said, the answer to the question that I've found is that the compelling story you tell about infrastructure is all about the future. Specifically, how you plan to evolve that infrastructure to support the changing IT environment and needs of the business while staying within reasonable and predictable budgets. 'Predictable' can not be overemphasized.
At any time, you should be able to tell the business managers what your infrastructure will look like in 1, 3, 5 years, what that will cost, what alternatives you have considered, and what the major risks are.
I have a better idea, courtesy of politics:
"We have successfully prevented Al Qaeda from taking down our infrastructure in April"
"This month, we are proud to announce that our infrastructure is now gender-neutral and completely embraces the LGBT community!"
"The IT datacenter is now fully secure against velociraptor attacks."
"We are happy to inform you that as of this month, our IT infrastructure is 100% Animal Cruelty Free!"
"For the month of April, we have completed our (self) certification, and as a result we now feature only Free Range servers in our infrastructure."
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Uh, I live in the USA, and I've worked in IT or other fields in three different major metro areas, and a dozen or so smaller areas. I've never - NEVER - seen this happen. I'm not saying it never happens, just that I've never seen it. Major, crippling IT outages happen all the time.
I even live in an area right now with a power provider to my home (Pepco) who is absolutely awful. Never seen an electrical outage take out an office I worked at.
Your second point is a good one, though one that's easily generalizable. EVERYONE should get more appreciation than they do. Janitors work a lot harder than I do, their work is worse and they get paid a fraction of what I get paid. But boy do I bitch if I come into an office that looks filthy. (Although, to be fair, I do go out of my way to say thank you.) So, yes, it's true, IT should be more appreciated. So should everyone else.
And - if we're being honest - then we should ask ourselves if, in general, we deliver a product that's so good that we deserve commendation for it. In my experience, this is rarely the case. In the industry - IE, when talking to other IT people - we know the difference between a good shop and a bad shop. But for someone on the outside, 99% of IT shops provide a bad user experience. We're ALL bad shops. So yes, it might be better to pat the plumber on the head - but honestly, if I'm the CEO, I really just don't have time to salve the feelings of a whiny plumber.
Set fires, put them out.
Take credit.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
This has never been my experience. This sounds like the kind of thing a lot of people SAY happens - but I've worked at enough places, in and out of the server room, that I question whether it actually DOES happen. Does IT need to justify its budget? OF COURSE. Everyone does. Every single department, every year. But in most places I've been, IT budgets go in one direction only - up. (And in the federal space, where I've been working recently, they go up hugely, for a terrible product.) And I've never been in a functional company where the people making the budget decisions don't recognize that infrastructure has value.
The best IT shops - the few and far between where things truly "run without issue" (and I've never been in such a place, though I was in one or two which were pretty close) are like that because management DOES recognize the need for the proper investment and support for these mission-critical systems. Frankly, I'd LOVE to see a counterexample. While we love the idea of the bastard systems engineer who keeps his systems running like clockwork despite being hated and despised... that's not the reality. If things are working well, it's because there's support at every level.
Again, your mileage may vary - and if you have been in a shop where this was in fact the case, I'd love to hear the actual story.
But the OP didn't suggest that the money tap was being shut off - just that they weren't getting their RDA of head-pats.
...but nobody ever reads those.
Having produced these for many years, the compelling story management wants is how your department impacts the overall business.
Tie your report back to the business because that's the only thing management cares about: people, time, costs, risks, major or significant projects / changes, future plans to improve the business or reduce costs and risks.
Develop metrics so that you can show how well you're doing on your current SLA's, downtime, hours / incident, etc. You can provide a graph week over week to show improvements. You can also show how user / customer incident volume goes up over time, and how much time you're spending on specific projects.
Specify new goals - "reduce SLA response by 5%", "build new system to mitigate this new risk you guys made"
Your in the drivers seat to show how you're doing the best for the overall business.
You talk about something the listener wants to hear. Things that interest them.
It's simple in principle but tough in practice because you need to know your audience. The only way to do that is to listen to them. What are *they* talking about? What are they trying to get the company to do? Use that to frame your story. So if it's trying to cut costs, tell them a story about how you successfully cut costs; or even better, how you *failed* to cut costs and but then later on figured out a better way. If they're pushing some management theory, show how you are putting it into practice, and how it's going to solve some long standing problem you've been struggling with.
There's not a "clear bright line" between effective communication and kissing ass. Superficially it looks much the same because both involve getting the audience to connect your story to something significant to them. The difference is in what you intend the audience to take away. If they come away knowing something about IT they didn't know before, that's solid communication.
Communication requires some shared frame of reference; a common model to which the symbols you are exchanging refers. I learned that on the first page of my data communications theory text, and it's true for human communications too. To communicate effectively with an audience you have to speak in their language. If you don't, everything you'll say just sounds just blibber-blabber to them, even if they're a *smart* audience.
That's another simple-sounding principle that's hard to put into practice. If you want to communicate unfamiliar information to someone, you have to bridge the gap and familiarize yourself with their mental landscape. Imagine a cosmetologist is tasked with explaining to you how to select and apply make-up. If she talked to you the way she'd talk to another cosmetics geek, you wouldn't learn anything. If she related it to something you already understood, like the OSI network stack or the 3SAT boolean satisfiability problem, you might learn something. But it would be a lot of work on her part; it's a lot easier to pretend you understand what she's talking about and hope you come away with something.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you're primarily focused on meeting the letter of "service level agreements", IMO you've already entered what I'll call "metrics hell" -- a desolate realm where meeting some (more likely than not) ill-conceived measure of "performance" takes precedence over actually helping your users get their jobs done more efficiently. Closing helpdesk tickets within some predefined timeframe is meaningless in the grand scheme of things if you haven't actually solved the users' problems.
So...bear with me here:
- If your team worked their tails off to make sure things ran smoothly...tell them what you did to make it run smoothly and why it's helping.
- If your team kept the lights on and averted disaster in some way...tell them what your excellent monitoring facilities helped to detect in advance and exactly how you prevented the problem before it started
- If your team responded to tickets / infrastructure requests from development and helped other teams reach their goals...tell them how you did that
Is it so much of a stretch to not just say "Well, nothing died. You need not know why." and actually tell them WHY everything runs so well?
In company meetings and reports you aren't supposed to be humble. You're supposed to brag on yourself and your team because whoever is giving the report is the sole advocate for why your team is valuable. If you have somebody who is not doing that, then you need somebody else representing your team at these meetings.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
I have been known to send in purchase requests for Industrial Donut Makers, Espresso Machines, etc...
They are never approved but when they come back and laugh about it, that is a great time to bring up a serious purchase request that has been stuck.
Electricity is, outside of the actual generating plants, just wires.
And transformers. And lots of electronics to monitor things, all geographically distributed. And interconnects (with lots of transformers), which will be remotely controlled to shunt power between sub-grids. And fancy algorithms to monitor demand, and weather, and predict future demand, and start bringing generators (and sometimes entire plants) on- and off-line with enough lead time to meet actual demand. And the bringing of generators on- and off-line can be a very complex process in itself.
And I don't even really know anything about the power grid--I'm just a consumer. So you have given us a shining example of the classic IT nitwit arrogance: "anything I do not do is trivial" ;-)
"We have twelve thousand users accessing our resources daily. Those resources have collectively exhibited a 99.997% uptime.
"We see nine terabytes of data flowing through our networks on a weekly basis."
"We manage nineteen B2B connections representing 22.5 million dollars a month in company business."
"We process an average of 120 helpdesk tickets a day, with a mean time to resolution of eight minutes."
And so forth. I've also seen reports on capital equipment vs overhead, trending over the last X number of years. It's useful to show, for instance, that the majority of your costs are not personnel related, lest upper management get the idea that they could save a buttload of money by outsourcing personnel to a bunch of taxi drivers in Nanjangud.
Customer satisfaction surveys could also be important, especially if they're substantially better than, for instance, the average customer satisfaction for offshore IT...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Hi there, in the month of April, this is what we saw:
1. 248,000,000 spam killed at our outer gateway that never made it to employee inboxes.
2. Major security announcements verified in April: Heartbleed, we use our scanning tools and have verified that we have no exposure to this issue.
3. No down time in messaging, payroll/HR/Finance systems.
4. Moved 250 separate pieces of code into production across various systems.
5. Completed IT installation at new facility X.
6. Etc.
Give them numbers that don't mean a lot, but show that stuff is happening.
My mom says I'm cool.
Nice to see someone who gets it. I've been in the IT infrastructure business for many years now, and I think that plumbing, electrical, or another skilled trade is exactly the right analogy.
The problem with that analogy is that plumbing, electrical, and HVAC are all extremely front loaded costs with relatively fixed (predictable as you said) long term expenses.
IT is a constantly moving target, subject to hardware refreshes every X years and likely software refreshes every Y/X years.
And no one ever said "hey, we can cut back on the maintenance for our HVAC because what does that guy do anyways?"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Coincidently the electricity went out at my home last night (after the pole went off like a giant bug zapper). A truck turned up within 30min, someone had told them I had seen sparks so they knocked on my door to ask me what I had seen. The lights came back on soon after. it was cold and raining pretty hard, I put a jacket on went up to where they were working and shouted "thanks gents", the enthusiastic reaction from the group of wet and miserable men told me it doesn't happen to them everyday*. It's not hard to put a bit of cheer into someone's day, especially when they are having a rough one and still get the job done, but don't fuck it up by expecting, me to go out in the rain and thank you for doing your job.
* I already knew that - the first half of my working life was day labouring and blue collar jobs, if you have never been part of the "working class" then you don't know what "underappreciated" feels like. After 15yrs "digging ditches" the first thing I noticed when I moved into an office job was that people said please/thanks just for doing your job. I know they don't really mean it, it's just good manners.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Meanwhile, the janitorial staff are over on their blogs asking "how can we present a compelling story to management?"