Reporting To Executives 301
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the justify-your-existence dept.
from the justify-your-existence dept.
chopsuei3 writes "As a System Administrator, I am charged with providing more insight into the functioning of the system. What types of reports and information do other System Administrators submit to executives and on what frequency? Measurements such as uptime and average page latency are useful, but our site is relatively stable and we see minimal downtime, so I'm looking for other important and useful information I can report up to better illustrate my efforts. Our system is also unique in that about 70% of the traffic we see is from devices and not human browsers. I am a lone System Administrator in a 20-person company which specializes in web-based irrigation management. I also simultaneously perform all IT-related tasks in the office, which may also be important to report up to executives on regular basis."
Some Simple Suggestions (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're briefing one or two executives, see if you can pull up their calendar for the past few months and see what kind of meetings they've been in. If anything overlaps with what you're presenting do not brief the same thing twice. If you have multiple executives, tailor your presentation to the top one or two in importance. Nobody wants their time wasted with something they've already seen.
If they want a low level view, you might put together an example story of the flow of information from the sprinkler A all the way back to your server and the response back with all the challenges faced along the way. Keep it interesting, uncluttered and as simple as possible unless further questions are asked.
If you've got budget, pick up the three Edward Tufte books [wikipedia.org] on The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information & Visual Explanations. Read them and incorporate that sort of data presentation into your reports.
Another great thing is if you can get interesting metrics established and defined and then develop scripts to ingest this information automatically into weekly reports (think of a perl script that digests very large log files). Have them create a cover sheet with the most general metrics and convert it to PDF or whatever the execs prefer to view them in. If you've got time, tailor them to the specific reader (your CTO is going to be interested in different things than your CEO or marketing director).
Log files are not a replacement for interaction (Score:5, Interesting)
better illustrate my efforts.
Presenting executives with log files, or web stats is no way to communicate with your boss. This will give him/her an idea of the work the server is doing, but not you. You might want to present your to-do lists. These to-do lists should include completed and incomplete tasks. Since it is a small company and you are the only SA, you might try to attend the companies planning meetings. Be a part of the company instead of just an employee and you won't have to worry about CYA all the time.
They really have no idea what you're talking about (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't mean to sound flippant or like a cocky IT jerk but they really have no idea what you're talking about. You'll have to translate it into terms they can understand.
In my company, the issue we're looking at is trying to quantify the value of IT. What management does not understand it devalues. So there's a bunch of geeks in a room doing shit. But what does it mean for the bottom line? Just filing reports on trouble tickets doesn't do the job. One ticket could be for showing a person where their start menu disappeared to and another could represent an continuing problem that took a hundred hours of work to resolve.
Staying until 2am to fix a problem in the server room doesn't count for diddly if all anyone sees of you in public is you being rude to a secretary for losing her word icon. That's all that will be remembered.
Re:Random figures (Score:3, Interesting)
A previous manager I had was always asking me different kind of numbers. I knew that manager did absolutely nothing with those numbers and also had no clue what I was talking about.
So one day I said that those numbers would take two days to retrieve. I then made up some numbers that looked like they could be correct and presented those while doing nothing during two days.
Absolutely nothing happened. I would not be surprised if that manager did not even looked at my fiction. Luckily now I have a manager who asks me what would be important numbers for his goals (which he explained) AND he is not afraid of bad numbers as they must be used to explain budged for staffing, upgrades, ...
"What do you want to achieve with the numbers?" is one of the first questions I ask. I and he know that numbers are statistics and can be presented in different ways without being wrong.
Re:Here's an idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed perfectly, with one big, fat caveat: Have a very good handle on what you have, and can and cannot be done. Also, never, EVER promise anything up-front w/o studying the problem.
Recently, I got one for my own employer, in that our CEO wanted to simply open his cell phone and search all contacts in the group...
Long story short, it's doable, but it eats a lot of resources to get it done (fortunately, we haven't had to spend any real money for it, but it's not quite complete just yet). While I doubt that every request would start getting hairy like that, you'd be amazed at how often the most innocuous of CxO requests can end up eating a mountain of time once you get into the minutiae.
Finally, I'd suggest that no matter the request, you never take your eyes off the prize - keeping existing systems running with as much uptime as possible. ;)
Re:Ask the executives (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Think Business Functionality (Score:5, Interesting)
Reporting numbers that are from a different department is silly. sysadmin for an airline website? report costs of operation, and current load with a reminder of where you need to upgrade. if you are a sysadmin and you are dipping into the database to look at sales numbers, you are not doing your job, you are doing the accounting departments job.
Website operational costs $xxxx.xx per month we had XXXXXXX visitors in that time period and are operating at 46% capacity. Currently experiencing a 6% growth from last month and a 1% growth from last year at this time. At this growth rate barring any hardware failures, we will not need any capacity upgrades for XX months. We had to replace a hard drive array at a cost of $X,XXX.xx and will be scheduling a 12 hour downtime window later this month for software upgrades to protect the company and site from fraud.
That is what an executive wants to see, distilled down to a small paragraph that gives him everything he wanted in less than 30 seconds. Also if you distill it tightly like that, you end up showing up the other guys that report because you are concise and to the point not wasting any of his time. They REALLLLY appreciate that.
Re:Here's an idea... (Score:4, Interesting)
The numbers could be entirely fictional - as long as the report looks good and seems to trend the right way it will never be read.
Re:Here's an idea... (Score:3, Interesting)
...unless you have a boss like I had a while ago, who said his techs have to come in t-shirts and jeans because it's his firm belief that if tech people come in suits they want to sell snakeoil and don't know what they're doing.
I am not kidding. I got the job because I was the only applicant who came in pullover and jeans because I didn't have time to change into my "I wanna have this job" suit.
Despite their rather odd hiring policy it was a pretty well run company with a lot of very good people and a management that let us do our job and care mostly for how to sell what we create (not sell something insane and get us to somehow fulfill their outlandish promises). Well, maybe not despite but because.
Re:Here's an idea... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Here's an idea... (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree, and I'd like to add a subtle addition to #4, think about what sort of activities would require the company to hire another IT person. If you think your company will grow enough in the next 5 years that this may be a possibility, it may be a good idea to quantify your time such that it is easier for the managers to see that indeed your "use rate" is trending upward to the point where another person is needed. (This falls into the above poster's "no surprises" mantra.) I would guess at your size company the worst thing for you is that your time needs expand to the point where it could "naturally" support 1.5 people. But hiring a half a person is hard, so you either eat a boat load of overtime or have some partial outsourcing solution or "temporarily" decide to scale back on some non-mission critical activities (eg employee PC tech support).
I'm suggesting that in addition to merely quantifying your time, you divide it into buckets that also indicate how you'd think the IT needs will grow and/or a partial person could be utilized. If, for example, the PC tech support is a non-mission critical aspect of your biz and if there are good outside consultants available who could do that if your time needs rise in another area, then this will be a useful aspect of your time to track.
Re:Here's an idea... (Score:1, Interesting)
Asking the pointy haired what they want is a fool's errand
Dead right!
My wife is extravagantly competent when it comes to organization. Her experience has been that asking the wrong person for specs or guidance is dangerous. Many PHBs have no idea what they need. Therefore they will treat such requests as a sign of weakness or incompetence. Part of your written job description may not use the word clairvoyance, but it will be expected of you.
She once worked for a company which had hired back two former all-star employees as consultants. She was lent to the consultants on a temporary basis. They were fantastically impressed with her ability and asked to have her permanently assigned to them. But the PHBs said, "She hasn't been here for six months, so company policy doesn't allow her to change jobs permanently." Nice going PHBs. When the consultants finished their contract, they made her a good offer to move with them to Los Angeles from the SF Bay Area. However, she wasn't willing to relocate.
About the same time, the company hired a brainless twenty-something who just boldly did what she thought was necessary, however dumb it was, but, since she didn't bother the high-rollers with questions, exerythig she did was looked on favorably.