Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Biggest IT Management Mistakes?
snydeq writes: Sure, nobody's perfect. But for those in charge of enterprise technology, the fallout from a strategic gaffe, bad hire, or weak spine can be disastrous, writes Dan Tynan, in an article on the biggest management mistakes in IT. "Some of the most common IT gaffes include becoming trapped in a relationship with a vendor you can't shake loose, hiring or promoting the wrong people, and hiding problems from top management until it's too late to recover." What are some other career- and company-destroyers you've witnessed in your years in IT?
Focusing the department on nothing but fire stomping and not focusing on preventative design/administration.
Implementing SAP
Outsourcing
Outsourcing your SAP implementation
People in India can't possibly know your business, your other employees or your customers as well as qualified, competent, real live boots on the ground in the US of A.
The two biggest mistakes I see is that a dev team which is doing fine gets cut and the people outsourced or offshored. Sales and quality hit the shitter, but management doesn't care one whit about that, since to them, the only people that matter are the S&M guys (sales/marketing), so more gets offshored.
Practically every mistake in IT is recoverable, except for failing to manage customer expectations.
In particular the two ways in which I can specifically think of that lack of customer expectation management becomes a project killer are lack of solid requirements (e.g., constantly changing requirements), and mismatch between the developer's idea and customer's idea of what the deliverable should look like.
I think that the requirements one is the worse of the two because it is so easy to have this conversation:
cust: Can you just add in this one little change here? ....
dev: Sure thing
cust: While you're at it
Code Complete covers this pretty well with the analogy of building a house. "Moving" a wall is really easy when the house is just a drawing on paper. It is considerably more difficult once the foundation is poured, the walls are up and the roof is on. People building houses know that asking to move a wall in the later stages means lots of money and time on the project. However, because software is an intangible and you can't see it taking shape in the same way as a house it is much more difficult (for someone who is not a software developer) to appreciate that things that seem simple might actually be major architectural tasks for the project.
Always make sure your sales team includes a dedicated engineer. They will help keep them in line, and mitigate situations in which a customer was promised something like running Internet Explorer on AIX.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
The big one I've seen with my current employer is that they've failed to expand their IT staff as the organization as a whole has expanded. The predictable result is that nothing but the most urgent requests gets handled promptly, and minor problems fester indefinitely.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I recently worked for a startup with a real big asshole brogrammer who never was in the office and always was misunderstanding what was going on. Eventually I caught on to these charades. He was also lying to investors about our startup actually containing AI when it couldn't have been farther from the truth. To cover my own ass I sent a text message to the CEO warning him that we were committing fraud. After that the mark was on my head. Our "brogrammer" calls me into a room and says that I'm toxic. I counter by asking him his working hours and if he understands what fraud is. Over the next few weeks regardless of what happened I was ripped into a room and told how toxic I was.
Of course I was let go shortly after because the dumb CEO who always called me "his brother" was well aware of the sham and apparently didn't care. The crazy sociopath actually thought that I would still be friends with him after being fired. He also thinks it's some point I will come back to work for him, likely whenever that brogrammer finally leaves. I wonder if he knows that I'm planning on telling the FTC and his investors about this "AI" company. It's a bunch of regex matching natural language to appear as if you are speaking to a digital assistant. They're actually telling customers that this is a real AI system.
I would call this a serious mistake because their entire future is essentially in my hands. Since this Psychopathic CEO thinks I'm his friend and going to keep the lid on this, he's just plodding along blowing his money on other endeavors. I'll just let him build a little bit more of a paper trail for me before I strike. That's what you get for listening to the brogrammer.
I've seen them all, but "buying products or services from Oracle" ranks pretty high up. Or more generally, putting faith in a vendor because of a glossy ad in "CIO Magazine" or somebody in management getting kickbacks. Nontechnical managers are incapable of making these decisions, but want to feel like they're in control, so they try anyway.
In about March, we started moving everything to Microsoft, and they audited us in August. About $250k worth of internal time later, they gave us the final bill. We didn't know, for example, you couldn't run Visual Studio Professional on Amazon on nondedicated hardware. Amazon charges $2.185 per hour for that which is $19,140.60 extra per year. We're paying $1,199 per year already for VS for every developer, so we assumed we'd be allowed to use it with no extra charges. We were wrong. I think the total bill after the audit was over $130k plus the extra almost $20k per year on Amazon. We don't even yet use Windows for production(customer facing stuff)!
Not implementing and operating a data backup system properly.
I have been bit by this myself and I thought I was doing a good job at it. (I'm not an IT manager -- I'm a software engineer who often gets shoved the IT manager's job for one reason or another.)
Almost every other failure can be mitigated but not this one.
Show me an OS that can replace W10 with everyday apps. There isn't anything out there that can handle Acrobat, MS office, Outlook, Exchange and other items, other than Windows. Oh, AD capability is a must out of the box.
Don't tell me what to use. Tell me what you are trying to accomplish, and I will find a solution. That's my job as an engineer. Of course you can't run Exchange on Linux without virtualization. But if your goal is to get e-mail, calendaring, and contacts I can do that for you.
Need Acrobat? Sorry. Try coming to me and saying "I need to read PDFs" or "I need to save this document as a PDF". Sure. I can solve those problems for you.
"I want Office on Linux". No, you don't. You want some of the *features* Office provides...on Linux.
Arriving at the new hospital data center (a room 500 ft from the old data center) before anyone else (including IBM), doors open, snowing a blizzard out at 25 degrees, calling the CIO and asking him if he'd been in the room lately.
Nope.
Asking him if he had the electrical contractor's number Call it. There is not s single power outlet visible. Not one.
Yeah, they closed up the walls and painted, the electrical sub never got called.
Extension cords. Frantic 220 installs. Mangled sheetrock. The AS/400 came up about 5:30pm. I was secretly pleased our NetWare cluster was in failover...
We got done about 10:30pm on a Sunday night. No one every asked if this was an IT blunder or or a contractor blunder, but I never discussed it with the CIO , ever. He paid the overtime. My boss was litersally, genuinely speechless, a first for him. This was the same client who had a Token_Ring network that would beacon furiously on a regular basis. IBM took three months to say they couldn't do anything with the CAUs/LAMs, and they should come out and be replaced with switches. Took me asn entire afternoon to find the loose DB-9 interconnect on an 8230 chassis, the ones that were welded on back then. Bolted it in place, problem solved, we did put in the T-C switches during the move. I credit Laura Chappell, her presentation on Token networks at Networks Expo when she was with Novell, and Lanalyzer, for making me a lot of money. Thanks you, Laura!
Now there was the client who, after much analysis, believed his app vendor and replaced our 16MB Token-Ring network with 100Base-T, since they were adamant that Ethernet would outperform Token. This required recabling, drops from the ceiling, because we had reused the existing Cat 3 PDS in floor trays, but that wouldn't do for 100Base-T. No, it made no difference. The vendor them blamed NetWare and AdvantageDB, and in came the NT 4 server. The IT supervisor was the owner's son, but that's not why I questioned his competence.
I don't know how that came out because they wouldn't use us for that, we were a 'NetWare shop', despite my finishing my MCSE. Fine. I know the new guys presented migrating NetWare to NT at our Novell user group two months later. That's how it was back then. Feh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Know what results are needed.
Does a medical database have to track phone calls, public and private databases to ensure every person who had a test got their results?
If a person had contact with a professional over a result? That person never got a result and never saw the professional after a test was done.
That a person actually got their results and did not move to another part of the country?
Bring in an expert who has worked with the exact problem around the world and who can make a database work in your country.
Real skills and the local experts get network and database they want.
Have political and gov move in and demand they be allowed to build the network with gov staff and other contractors who have no skills.
Thats how big gov can fail.
Take a project from the gov that has the skills and give to the politically connected private sector.
The contractors have no skills.
Thats how contractors can fail.
Stop using people with no skills. Stop allowing people to work on complex projects who did not pass their exams and got given a decade of social advancement.
IT can work if the right experts in the private sector, gov, mil or as contractors are found.
Stop advancing very average people with no skills into the IT sector every generation.
Find professionals that can understand complex problems.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Time and again, it's the sunk cost fallacy. A system that an organization might have spent a few million dollars to build is just not shaping up into anything they can use, but they keep at it rather than ditching it and seeing what they can do to change things.
What ironic about this is that I think agile actually encourages the sunk cost fallacy because teams will go "oohhh we can 'pivot' a little each sprint." Uh, no. If it's deep-fried dog shit for an architecture, and design you're not going to "pivot" out of this. It gets even worse when you have a management culture that doesn't understand refactoring; most of the agile teams I've been on have had managers who flat out don't care about technical debt and think they can default on it which reinforces the problems with the sunk cost fallacy down the road.
... it was actually just RDP to a remote server.
At the first management/vendor meeting, I got to ask the first question: "How will response time compare to what we have now, with our servers in-house?"
"Oh, it will be much faster!"
It got worse from there.
I asked the owner if he knew that light slowed down in a medium and he said he did.
We already used RDP to the desktop and he KNEW about the latency.
Management ignored the red flags I threw on the play and put everything on the cloud against my recommendation.
We were a law firm and a time came when an elderly couple traveled from far away to sign some wills and the goddam cloud was down.
The family law practitioner blew her fucking top and confronted me and told me to implement Plan B.
I told her, "Ma'am, Plan B is Plan A."
It cost a fortune, but they paid termination fees and put everything back the way I had it before they went nuts.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
We were on Linux for our file server for a decade and ended up needing to switch to Windows. We were tired of not having a good consultant and Windows consultants were easy to find.
The mistake incidentally was not in switching to Windows per se; it can easily do the added tasks we need of it and Linux could not. The mistake was in thinking the issue was in finding good Linux consultants-- the issue was simply in finding good consultants period.
Don't hire a music major to be your CSO.
The best CIO I've met was a music major, he even played in a symphonic orchestra for a while. He got started in IT because he wanted to design his own DSP.
Some people are a lot more than their diploma.
lucm, indeed.
The biggest mistake any company makes? Treating IT as a cost center.
Unless your company sells IT services, by definition IT is a cost center. This is basic accounting.
There was a good Dilbert about this in 1997.
http://dilbert.com/strip/1997-...
lucm, indeed.
If done properly IT is a revenue center. Other departments must internally account for "paying" for IT services. Note it is easy to screw this up, but it can work.
Make sure you actually can restore. Do it regularly. Restore to different hardware. If using tape, restore using different tape drives. Make testing restores a routine thing. When I was a boss, we did daily backups onto tape and same day read the tapes at the offsite recovery site (about 30 miles away).
During my career, I've seen two restore failures where they'd been backing up for years but the backups were no good and they had no idea.
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
Windows as a primary OS is somewhat vague. Server or Desktop?
For 4 out of 5, that would be "neither".
Maybe 15% of Google uses their version of Ubuntu for desktop.
I have been to the Googleplex many times. I have seen plenty of Linux desktops, and plenty of people using Macbooks. I have never, not once, seen anyone working on a Windows desktop or laptop for anything other than testing.
No role starting with a C demands any skills beyond salesmanship.
Executives with no IT experience running IT departments.
NO. More likely the executive making promises to customers and PMs without checking with the IT department and then demanding a months worth of work be done in 72 hours to one week and fire them if they can't get it done etc.
If you do get it done then it will continue. You are screwed either way
http://saveie6.com/
What you're asking is extremely unfair, especially from users who are not used to think like IT-lawyers. To them "Acrobat" is not just "reading PDFs", it is a whole set of capabilities including things you won't find in free alternatives (like encryption, form support, etc.). Asking users to articulate those needs individually, when they can summarize with the phrase "I need Acrobat", which they already know and of which they already know it supports their needs, is both unfair and unrealistic.
And it's not just capabilities, it's also a general lack of hassle. I use OpenOffice a lot, but frequently it fucks up the layout of Word documents. As a user I neither want nor need that hassle.
Look at it from a users' perspective: what they have now works. What you are selling is a journey into a world of pain, hassle, and "sorry we can't do that". Why would they want that? What tangible (i.e. not abstract) advantage do you offer to make all that worthwhile?
And some of the things I hate most about Acrobats are these unnecessary additions to PDF files. It should be a read-only format, impossible to turn into a vector for malware. But no, Adobe screwed that pooch. I cannot open a PDF now, with Acrobat or Preview, without it thinking I have just modified the document and so it will ask me when I close it if I want to save my changes. I don't want encryption, if I wanted encryption I would encrypt the file. I hate vendors that send me "secure" documents and then require me to check in every 6 months to get new certificates so that I can continue to read it. I just want to read the document and I don't need the heavy weight Acrobat with it's strange UI doing this.
Software changes... Applications come in and out of fashion, even new versions of the same software change radically between versions.
When we were in school, we were taught wordperfect for dos because "thats what businesses use", by the time we left school there were very few (if any) businesses left using wordperfect or dos. They were using msoffice 95 on windows 95 or nt4, which is still radically different to the versions in use today.
The differences between 2 versions of msoffice or 2 versions of windows can actually be more significant than moving to linux or libreoffice, and the prevalence of people accessing the internet using smartphones and tablets has shown that people don't actually need (specific versions of) windows to do so.
As soon as you become familiar with something, that software will become obsolete and people will be using something else. Teaching specific software is stupid, you need to teach users how to accomplish their goals with a variety of different programs, and how to identify the functionality they require in any software capable of doing it.
People are not incapable of adapting to changes, they just complain about it because they don't like change. Usually they aren't given any choice, and just end up getting on with it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Many of those users also get by with a given application because it's all they know or all they have access to, but if they got used to something else they may soon get used to and benefit from additional features offered by that software.
Many users actually complain about bugs or deficiencies in software they use on a daily basis, bugs or deficiencies which are not present in other software. People put up with what they're given and get used to the bugs and workarounds required, then will complain if you give them something else because it now has a different set of bugs and workarounds even if its superior on balance.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
There was a story a few years ago about how google banned the use of windows desktops on security grounds. If you needed a windows desktop as a specific requirement of your job (testing, dev etc) you had to be able to justify it.
But it does make quite a statement, the more technically oriented a company is the less likely they are to be using windows.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
A friend makes bank now after his CEO got pissed at sales and marketing doing this shit. His sole job is to go to sales meetings and keep sales honest. He knows the business well, and studies up on the customer to understand who they are and what they seem to need. Then he shoots down sales during the meeting when they start promising too much or trying to sell something that the customer doesn't really seem to want or need.
The marketing folks hate him, but the CEO, developers, and the customers love him.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
YOU tell a C-Level that he's not going to get administrative privileges on his machine, I dare you. And while you're at it, tell him he has to use the company proxy with the content filter.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The most expensive, wasteful, credibility damaging, productivity reducing, and sheer chaos producing IT management mistake in my experience was the decision by a certain freight company to outsource IT. The two-letter outsourcing company, who will remain nameless, in sales presentations (which I attended) painted a rosy picture of a "right shore" solution with capable vendor-trained personnel in several call centers across the world, so that no matter what the local time, the call center would be on local daytime, which would help them draw the best talent for the job, etc etc. They were offering best-in-class for a fraction of the cost of in-house IT.
Upper management, who honestly thought that the entire job of IT was to push a button whenever a light came on, bought it hook line and cancellation penalty. As is often the case, they shook their collective fingers at us and told us "you'd better document your job thoroughly before you leave". Devops, my department, maintained a fairly extensive knowledge base, so it was only a matter of printing out all of our written procedures and handing them over (with two hands, because it was a lot of paper)to management of the outsourcing vendor. And, they lost them. So we printed them out again and handed them over. And they lost the second batch too. I'm convinced that they never intended to keep them. (More on that below.)
Our last day was Friday, which was also the cutover day. I had transferred to a department that was being retained, so got to stick around and see the carnage. It was fascinating in exactly the same way a high speed head-on collision between two passenger trains is fascinating. You're retching, but you can't look away.
This was back when Blackberry was still a thing, and all the execs carried one. BES went down Saturday and remained down for two weeks. This was the sign to upper management that things were perhaps not going as swimmingly as advertised.
The helpdesk was a shambles. You couldn't understand them, they didn't know what to do or whom to contact, and major incidents would just disappear in the system and never get addressed. Employees would come to those of us who survived the layoff and BEG us not to make them call the helpdesk.
The outsourcing vendor shook their fingers at us and said that those damned former employees had not documented their jobs well enough. I had a (third) copy of our procedures, and the names of the managers I'd handed them to both other times, and argued that we had in fact made a good faith effort, just ask these people. Only to find out that those managers no longer worked for the company. Curious.
The vendor said they could recover from our former IT employees' incompetence, but it'd Cost More Money. And that was the other shoe dropping.
Some former IT personnel were rebadged, so occasionally stuff still got done. They worked long hours in very stressful situations. Most of them moved on as soon as the economy started to improve.
Promises of a "right shore" solution were absolute fabrications. The entirety of IT, except for those few overworked rebadged employees, was a single call center in lower central India, manned by people apparently plucked off the street, sitting at card tables with IP phones.
The company tried to improve response by sending a number of people over to India to train the personnel there, but ran into an interesting phenomena -- as soon as employees of the outsource service got training, they WENT ON TO BETTER PAYING JOBS. This training effort served to flush out the people with any experience, causing an influx of new people who couldn't find an "enter" key with a gun to their head.
A major plumb for people who got a little experience was getting off night shift, which was our day shift. So as soon as we'd built a relationship with an admin and taught him to do valuable things, he'd brag about how he's finally getting off night shift, and we'd never hear from him again.
Speaking of which, I don't think th
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.