Strategy Clinic: The cure for the annual holiday headache
- Posted:
- 09:21 12 Aug 2004
- Topics:
- IT Management | e-mail
My IT team of 15 is unable to meet its
workload without using contractors. Most of the staff take holiday
during the school break. We cannot afford to lose staff by refusing
reasonable leave requests, but management does not see the need for
extra resources. How can I avoid this in future?
Identify essential activities needed by the business
You need to take stock of your workload if your IT team cannot meet
current arrangements, regardless of the summer holidays. Break down
the activities to identify your "steady state" requirements,
one-off activities, and the rationale for using contractors and
whether activities are better undertaken by a managed
service.
Identify the key activities that support the business, talk to your
end-users to see what services they most value and need. Are there
activities that you should not be doing? Are the costs of your
services fully understood and justified?
Working with senior management and departmental users, you need to
produce a list of core activities that the organisation needs and
can be justified. Identify a suitable resource to deliver this
service and present it to your management. If you have "lumpy"
activities such as technology refresh roll-outs, then use
contractors or a managed service. If you have services that are
difficult to deliver, consider outsourcing these as there may be
benefits from economies of scale that the supplier community can
provide.
Your task is to help your senior management to understand their
responsibilities in terms of the governance of IT - your situation
is not sustainable and represents a risk to the business.
Qualitative benchmarking and the use of external advice would be
very useful to help to pinpoint your issues.
Roger Rawlinson, NCC Group
Convince your board of the value of
contractors
A consistent challenge is to do more - and to do it faster - with
fewer people. Whether you have 15 staff or 150, or even 1,500
contractors in India, your business will have more opportunities
than its IT team can service.
Senior management should prioritise IT initiatives, after receiving
your input, and the timing of its delivery. Factors to consider
include cash available, the timing of related business initiatives,
external events and your resource profile. With these priorities
agreed, fixing your holiday resource needs and requirement for
consultants will be easier.
Resource profiles must match your industry and strategy. People
need holidays, they work better if they are anticipating rest, and
they may work harder if you demonstrate respect for their work/life
balance.
In return, your staff need to be responsible for making sure they
have colleagues who can deputise for them, that documentation is
prepared and that the handover is comprehensive. They also need to
be flexible. Not everyone can take the same weeks as holiday.
Rotate the favourite weeks and look for other ways to compensate
and provide incentives if employees' holiday expectations cannot be
satisfied. Contractors may help.
Do your directors understand that resourcing with contractors is a
common practice in IT? Provide them with the primary arguments:
- Contractors keep permanent headcount low
- They are flexible additions only when needed
- They offer temporary, deep-technical skill
- They are used in more than half of IT organisations
- They are a key strategy for the delivery of business priorities.
As a final thought, I strive to set a good example by taking my own holidays, sometimes without the children.
Antony Smyth, partner, Ernst &
Young
A question of balancing demand and capacity
It is tempting to say that this is just a capacity planning problem
and that you should prioritise activities according to available
workload. If we aim to be more creative, what are your
opportunities to bring in additional temporary staff? Are there
opportunities to extend your workforce at peak times?
You may be able to use staff who have retired only recently or
college students who can be trained prior to the summer holidays
and then provide cover during this period.
You might find that higher management is more sympathetic to your
problem if you demonstrate that you are planning ahead, given that
summer holidays are predictable. Perhaps you can also persuade your
management team to spend some time on the IT shopfloor, manning the
helpdesk. This may help them to understand your predicament.
In the short term, you may have few alternatives to reducing the
workload or taking on additional contractors depending on the
skills mix of your current group.
Essentially you can only manage two parameters, demand and
capacity. Associated with these are risk and quality. Based on your
current feedback, you will need to present your case in these
business terms and then it becomes a management decision.
Sharm Manwani, Henley Management
College
Time off should be built into budgeting plans
Did you plan for holiday and an estimate for sickness when you
compiled your budgeting and project timescale plans? If your
organisation gives six weeks' holiday a year, a team of 15 can take
1.7 man years, which is more than 11% of your workforce
availability. You also have to add sick leave and other possible
time-off situations, such as compassionate leave. Basic project and
manpower planning should incorporate these sorts of things in, so I
am at a loss to know how you have reached this situation.
One assumes from your question that the majority of your team have
children at school. Was it ever discussed at interview stage that
there might have to be some sacrifices of the coveted holiday
periods? If not, how did you envisage you would manage the
situation?
Is this problem significantly greater in your IT department than in
others? If not, then the general management team has a wider issue
to deal with.
Only you can judge whether you will lose people by refusing their
holiday requests. But is it reasonable for all of them to want two
or three weeks in the same six-week period? Of course, a similar
situation may exist at the offices of your employees' partners. And
you do not want to be perceived to be tacitly encouraging members
of your team to take their children out of school during term time,
since this results in quite a severe reaction by the education
authorities.
It is a good employee's responsibility to try to minimise the
impact of these issues on his place of employment just as it is the
employer's responsibility to try to be as flexible and
understanding about the needs of employees.
There are four solutions to this problem:
- You have built this in, so project and other work timescales should not be affected
- You bring in contractors (who you say you already use, so there should not be a culture problem) to maintain work output levels
- You have to tell your senior managers that this, quite large, out-take of time availability was not planned for, and they will want to know why
- You have to tell some of your team that they cannot take the leave they want.
Robin Laidlaw, president, CW500
Club
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NCC Group: www.nccglobal.com
Ernst & Young: www.ey.com
Cranfield School of Management: www.cranfield.ac.uk/som
Computer Weekly 500 Club: www.cw500.co.uk
Henley Management College: www.henleymc.ac.uk
British Computer Society: www.bcs.org.uk/elite
Impact: www.impact-sharing.com
The Corporate ITForum: www.tif.co.uk
Dominic Barrow: www.dominicbarrow.com
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