IT managers in the finance sector are finding themselves
trapped between the ongoing
skills shortage and a
squeeze on budgets as the
credit crunch bites which means they are no longer able to
recruit contractors to plug skills gaps. IT managers in other
sectors may soon find themselves facing similar headaches. Here are
seven suggestions for tackling the skills crunch.
Prioritise: "Look at the projects you are doing
from a portfolio management perspective," advises Iain Davidson, a
director with business change
consultancy Quortex. "Get close to the people in the business
who are the source of the projects and work with them to understand
how critical each project is and which ones you can stop working
on."
Spend to save: Invest in improvements to your
operations that will cut your workload. If you can identify and
eliminate tasks that do not add value or which can be simplified,
you will give your existing team more time to use the scarce skills
you hired them for.
That is the approach adopted by
Principality Building
Society, the tenth largest Building Society in the UK. "We had
lots of routine tasks that took 15 minutes each 10 times a week,
and required fairly high-level access privileges and some systems
knowledge," explains Marc Jones, Principality's IT infrastructure
support manager. "Using
NetIQ's
Aegis, we have been able to automate those so that they can be
handled by first-line support staff, freeing second and third-line
support staff for more valuable work that makes better use of their
skills."
Shift the focus of your team to upfront business
analysis: The later in the development lifecycle you have
to fix an issue, the more time-consuming and costly it becomes.
More time spent on understanding what you are trying to do,
creating a robust design and ensuring you have come up with the
best technical approach will reduce work downstream, Davidson
points out. "As well as requiring less development effort fixing
issues, you will reduce the risk of scope creep and have a basis on
which to choose tools and technologies that will help save
development and support effort later," he says.
Improve team performance: Many IT departments
are still
"stovepiped",
with each team concentrating on just one area of IT operations in
isolation from the others. Improving the way these different
specialists work together can have a significant impact on overall
workloads and skill requirements.
When it comes to development and implementation, Davidson says
you need to involve the right people at the right time - and that
usually means much earlier in the project than traditionally was
the case. For example, get the operational staff who will be asked
to manage the production system involved at the analysis, design
and technology selection stage to ensure the solution can be
supported cost effectively.
On the production side, Principality is demonstrating how you
can turn specialist support staff into generalists who can deal
with any of the several different types of technology in use at the
Society. Using Aegis, it has automated support tasks so that
technicians who understand how to carry out tasks on one platform
can perform the same tasks on other technologies without needing to
have detailed knowledge of how those other platforms manage the
tasks. "As a result, staff can be more easily cross-skilled on
other technologies, and we can now have everyone covering
everything," says Jones.
Develop atalent management strategyand the
tools to support it: "A booming economic environment
allowed managers to use contractors to plug skill gaps that came
from poor planning, but the credit crunch has taken that
flexibility away," says David Helme, business development manager
at HR systems consultancy
Epi-Use. "A talent management strategy allows you to understand
what roles and skills are needed to satisfy the demands of the
business, allocate your existing staff to those roles, and identify
gaps and ways of filling them."
The trouble is, he admits, many managers do not have easy access
to
information about their current staff to be able to plan
effectively. He says you need to open up a dialogue with HR to find
ways they can push the data they hold on staff skill profiles,
appraisals and training plans out to managers in IT.
Manage training better: If
you cannot recruit or buy in skills, you need to train existing
staff - but training often takes a back seat to hitting deadlines
for current projects. Helme suggests making it easier for staff to
access training by offering e-learning in the office and at home,
as well as access to traditional classroom-based courses. He also
advises putting systems in place that allow you to develop training
plans for each member of staff, monitor that they have received the
prescribed training, and reward staff for investing their own time
in training in skills you need.
Improve individual performance: Ramping up on
technical skills is just one half of the equation. The way your IT
team behave towards their colleagues may be slowing you down and
wasting time and effort. For instance, we all know people who hoard
their knowledge because they believe knowledge is power, or who
constantly spring surprises on colleagues because they are not very
good at documenting and communicating what they are doing. "You
need to focus more on behaviour-based management and brush up your
own coaching skills to help staff deal with unproductive
behaviours," Davidson says.
He admits that this is not a quick fix - you need to identify
and describe unproductive behaviours so team members know what is
expected of them, and reward people for behaving appropriately in
the same way you reward them for hitting targets. "It also needs to
be lived from the top and embedded throughout the organisation," he
warns. "It is not going to work, for instance, if managers
regularly come out of meetings and immediately go back on what was
just agreed."