See Tee Ohh

February 23, 2006 5:36 PM

I am moving into a IT Manager / CTO role for a company of about 200 people and am looking for advice, books, and websites on how best to manage a IT department. Most of the stuff I have found is geared toward very large organizations. Implementing ITIL and SOA is a little hardcore for an organization of my size. I am looking for straight-forward best practices for things like asset management / inventory, desktop management, security / audit, helpdesk, etc. etc. Anybody out there already doing this successfully? Any good blogs or websites other than TechRepublic. I am looking for real-world solutions and not a bunch of frameworks and jargon.
posted by jasondigitized to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Unfortunately, I don't have any resources I can recommend to you. However, I just transitioned from a 3 year stint in Asset Management in a multinational company, supporting about 5,000 PCs. Bigger than you are looking for, yes, but some of the principles might be the same. If you have any specifics I could try to help you out. My email is in my profile.
posted by bwilms at 6:16 PM on February 23, 2006

I'm in an identical situation. The company who brought me in has never had a dedicated IT staff. They've grown from 100 employees in 3 locations to 300 in 7 locations over the past 4 years.

For the past year and a half, they've used a third-party help-desk for support, but finally(!) decided they needed someone in-house who could speak the language and manage tech.

I've spent the last 4 weeks traveling to the locations, learning the network, establishing a relationship with the help desk, and identifying needs, of which there are many.

I was actually going to post this same question a few weeks ago, but I've been so busy playing catch up that I forgot.

I anxiously await answers to this question based on more experience than my own.

I can say that the employees are all ecstatic to have a dedicated IT manager on board, so the reception has been warm...
posted by Roach at 6:45 PM on February 23, 2006

Could you tell us whats already established as far as documentation, resources an existing budget. Number of techs, industry. Anything that might give us more info to work with?

I'm in a similar situation at a non-profit and am basically building things from scratch and learning as I go. My blog has tons of links to software n such that you might find useful, as I conduct research into various products. (sorrry for the site plug, but I really did start it to help myself and those in a similar situation.)
posted by madmanz123 at 6:57 PM on February 23, 2006

The "best" way of managing a given IT department is going to depend entirely on the business goals of the organization, and how the IT function fits into the overall business strategy. If you are a 3 person IT department in a single site 200 person wholesale distribution company, you're supporting desktops, servers, and maybe Web sites and telecom services in a functional support role. You may need some vendor management tools, a ticketing system, and some basic budget and project management tools, but your main jobs are going to be keeping the email moving, the phones working, and the servers up.

If you are managing a 30 person IT function that is expected to deliver new IP assets as part of a business engineering and continuous development process in a management consultancy firm, you have a fundamentally different set of functions, and you need different tools. Clearly, project management and collaboration are bigger parts of your issues, and you may be called upon to outsource more service and support functions. You need service level agreement management tools, and maybe, some WAN and security management systems. You may need CVS, IDE, and deployment control.

It sounds like you are in more the first situation than the latter. Rather than looking for generic advice of a broad nature, I'd suggest you first look close to home.

Start by finding out if the last audit cycle for the business included an IT audit, which, in the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley, is an increasingly common function, even for small, privately held firms. If there was such a thing, how did it turn out? Were there any IT process deficiencies identified, and if so, any recommendations? Get on top of anything that comes up from audit immediately, as these are the "best practices" that your management is going to hear about most convincingly from outsiders. If the audit report showed major deficiencies in IT process, you might not get much else done for the first year.

If there was no IT audit, or no big items outstanding from whatever audit was conducted, the next thing would be to review your vendor contracts, software licenses, and service agreements, and be in touch with all your principal vendors for recommendations and assessments. Sure, this sounds like you're throwing the doors of the shop open to every sales person with a call sheet to fill, but if you do it right, you'll be getting some decent advice at the same time you are putting yourself in contact with the people who got your organization into the shape it is currently in, be that good or bad. Mine your vendors carefully, and best practice recommendations will fall out like rain in Seattle. It's up to you to evaluate, prioritize, recommend, and maybe decide, but you at least will start with decent recommendations, if your vendors have any integrity. If you get the sense they don't, you may need different vendors, pronto.

Depending on how much time you have to dig through it all, some of the major IT industry publications contain worthwhile information. You can sign up for free subscriptions to a few of the majors, and do 100 pages of trade news reading a week to stay abreast of trends.

I'd also see if you can get yourself or your people into local user groups for your major vendor's products, if they make sense, and are local. I wouldn't get involved in driving 200 miles for monthly meetings of a Microsoft SQL Server group, but if I was headquartered in some place like Atlanta, and was an Oracle shop, I'd definitely be making Oracle user group meetings regularly.
posted by paulsc at 7:17 PM on February 23, 2006

The Practice of System and Network Administration by Tom Limoncelli and Christine Hogan has some of the best "how to manage" material I've ever read and covers inventory, helpdesk, etc.

Tom's recent Time Management for Systems Administrators is good for non-sysadmins too.
posted by mrbill at 7:48 PM on February 23, 2006

hmm i don't know if you care about this since you didn't mention it, but i've been told several times that First, Break All The Rules is a great book on how to make your employees happy. I would venture to say making employees happy is crucial to the success of a department since IMHO there's nothing that destroys a company/department faster than bad morale and high turnover.

I personally have had managers for whom I'd easily work harder just cause they were such great people to work for and managers that I hated so much that i didn't work nearly close to my capacity since i spent so much time being frustrated/bitter.

good luck and congratulations :)
posted by karen at 8:43 PM on February 23, 2006

All great advice! I'd still suggest that you look at getting your ITIL certification though. It may seem a little hardcore but it is scalable and will come in handy when the company expands/ you jump ship to a bigger company. My managers are only responsible for a staff of 8 (including them) but they use their ITIL training all the time. There is something to be said for being overqualified in this industry.

Also, as with anything of this nature, you can just use what is useful or feasable at the time and trash everything else.
posted by ChazB at 4:02 AM on February 24, 2006

I'm definitely in the same boat, although I'm at an even smaller company. We have a lot of laptops, small servers, and other tech items that are sent to tradeshows around the country/world, and I've been searching high and low for some sort of asset management software that uses dynamic locations, but also lets me manage everything in the office as well.
posted by Ekim Neems at 6:30 AM on February 24, 2006