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Meet Your Staff
Everyone has different methods for assessing the competency of staff and how team members handle their workload. Hermens likes to set up off-site meetings with her direct reports. At Timberland, the human resources department helped her design a three-day workshop that began with a slide showing positive and negative comments -- with no attribution -- that other executives made about IT. She used that as a springboard for discussing how IT and other parts of the company work together.
By the end of the three days, which took place two months into her tenure, she learned that, as at many midmarket companies, the department had a weak process for project delivery. There were many requests, but "no coherent plan for delivering."
Based on meetings with executives and her own staff, Hermens was able to put together an early win for her department: She got them to form a new process for prioritizing and delivering projects. Once the process was drafted, she asked her business partners to help finalize it.
"We will do projects 1, 3, 10 and 22 through 26," she told them (although the actual numbers were different). "We will not do the others. Here's what that plan looks like by quarter. We believe this is the best we can do. You go back and massage it. If we've misunderstood your priorities, let us know. Then we'll finalize it. We're going to hit the ground hard, and we're going to do everything on this list."
Early wins can buff up IT's reputation, says Luke Friang, who started about a year ago as CIO and vice president of Drugstore.com Inc., a $416-million online pharmacy based in Bellevue, Wash. The trick is to keep these wins simple, he says, so that they don't distract from the larger goal of using the first months on the job to set a long-term strategy.
"It needs to have a low risk and high reward," Friang says. "It could be as simple as putting in a quick escalation process: If we have a priority 1 ticket, you're going to hear back from us in 15 minutes and then every hour until it's resolved."
Friang avoided bigger projects early on partly because he wasn't yet sure what his team of 70 could do -- and he didn't want to give the group a black eye in its first year together. "You want to have a very good first year," he emphasizes. "Part of that is building credibility with your staff and with the business." That means avoiding major technology changes and upgrades if at all possible.
Assessing the staff naturally leads to figuring out what projects are under way. Ciena's Donley makes a point of trying to learn early on about any rogue IT projects that aren't on his official list of assets. He does so by emailing and talking with other senior managers. "I said, 'I'm on a mission to have IT do IT work.' I basically said, 'I'm not engineering our products, and I'm not selling, so why are you writing my IT code?' It got a chuckle, but then I got a whole list of names" of non-IT people who were in charge of various rogue projects. In addition to giving him a more complete list of the company's IT assets, the responses highlighted times when departments felt compelled to install their own technology.
Hermens makes a point of schooling her staff in business alignment during her first 100 days on a job. She invites C-level executives to speak to the department. "It's partly show and tell about performance," Hermens says. But it's also about getting business people to articulate what they need directly to her staff "instead of me being the intermediary."
In addition to her off-site meetings with direct reports, Hermens has an open-door policy. She doesn't summon in junior staffers because "part of what I'm trying to figure out is who's got motivation" to walk in that open door.
Friang, however, believes in walking the floor to break the ice with his staff of 70. "I find out where they're from and how long they've been working with the company. I just try to get beyond that anxiety ... as much as I can in the first week."
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