Ask Slashdot: How Do You Prove an IT Manager Is Incompetent? 331
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?"
Parroting what his subordinates have told him? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this the real issue? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Circular logic (Score:5, Interesting)
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. The principle is commonly phrased, "Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence." In more formal parlance, the effect could be stated as: employees tend to be given more authority until they cannot continue to work competently. It was formulated by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book The Peter Principle, a humorous[1] treatise, which also introduced the "salutary science of hierarchiology".
The principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Eventually they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their "level of incompetence"), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions. Peter's Corollary states that "[i]n time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties"[2] and adds that "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence." "Managing upward" is the concept of a subordinate finding ways to subtly manipulate his or her superiors in order to prevent them from interfering with the subordinate's productive activity or to generally limit the damage done by the superiors' incompetence.
This principle can be modeled and has theoretical validity for simulations.[3]
(wikipedia)
Return on investment (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Why not (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Several things (Score:4, Interesting)
Figure out what convinced you that the head of IT is the problem.
runs at roughly twice the budget of what the CFO has deemed appropriate
Why is the CFO competent about this, but the IT chief isn't? We all know how expectations can easily inflate beyond all reason. I've seen competent people in trouble for failing to accomplish the impossible. A group with unrealistic expectations can burn through a lot of employees, before someone starts thinking that maybe the problem isn't that they can't find any good people, maybe it's them.
Given the extreme uncertainty in time and resources required for non-trivial software projects, on time (in the information we were given, there was no mention of projects being late) at only twice the estimated costs might be considered fair or even good results. What I've heard is that of all software projects, only 10% are finished on time and within budget. Only 10%! A further 30% are finished, but are late or over budget, or both. About 30% are only partly successful, achieving only some of the goals before being cancelled. The final 30% are total failures, abandoned when it becomes obvious that the plans were at best too ambitious, or at worst completely crazy, being not only utterly unrealistic, but also of no use even if they had been achieved. This last happens when you have managers who prefer hand waving and magical thinking to actual hard work and hard truths. All in all, that's a stunning rate of failure. It seems we ought to be able to do better than that, and I think we will get better. But until we improve, this manager's performance ought to be measured against that standard, not against some opposite expectation that 90% of software projects should succeed.
And perhaps the rest of the company could use more appreciation of the problems that IT faces. Then instead of being perpetually disappointed in IT, they might have a little more respect. I've seen IT used as the whipping boy, and the handy, go-to excuse for why others couldn't meet their targets. It's IT's fault! They didn't keep our computers running! (Nevermind that we spent hours surfing porn sites with IE 6, infected all our computers, and bogged down our network with gigabytes of video downloads.) If the company has the mentality that IT is a "cost center", and, given what the CFO said, they probably do, IT is at a serious disadvantage.
Re:Circular logic (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with the budget being out of scale for similar size organizations may also be due to what they are producing. I had this same question asked by a friend who wanted me to essentially agree that their Director of Technology was being wasteful and negligent. It took me two seconds to see why their expenses were higher than similar sized IT shops: they were supplying SaaS. The problem was the rest of the company was ignorant of how to properly count costs in the situation. They were simply attempting to sum all expenses and use that total to show the department was too expensive... even though it was also the only production department. They didn't account for the server costs/overhead of having their product as a SaaS vs similar sized development companies that sold prepacked products.
Realistically it all depends on what field of business they are in, the actual role of IT in said business, and their interior directives.