IT Management Means Speaking Two Languages
Most IT department managers or project leaders grow up out of the IT technical ranks. That is a good thing. For one thing, an IT manager must have the ability to talk intelligently with technical experts. If he or she cannot sustain the respect of a staff of highly trained and talented IT developers, that manager's ability to be effective is in bad shape.
An IT manager has a very unique job because you sit directly between the two most important groups in the business world that you must get to work together to be successful. You manage a department of developers who are capable of performing technical wizardry if you manage them right. And you work for the top-level leadership of the business who are capable of making the business and you very profitable if you can deliver what they need, when they need it, on time and under budget.
In order to achieve the goals of both groups, the IT manager must be able to speak two languages fluently. Moreover, you have to be able to communicate the needs and interests of both groups to each other and do so in a way that results in greater cooperation and productivity - resulting in completed projects, happy developers and happy upper management. It’s a tricky operation to pull it off. But if you can speak both languages, you are in for a long and very successful career at the IT management level.
Very Different Languages
If you got to management by working up through technical jobs, you understand the language of technical people. Knowing how to be proficient in "tech speak" is about more than just understanding the acronyms. Your history in the culture of technical developers will serve you well. Speaking the language of developers means understanding what makes them tick and how the technical tools they use can be brought to bear on the development problem at hand.
Even within the technical world, there are various disciplines that must be able to integrate with each other and you must be able to make that possible by understanding the tools and terms of each group. If you have applications developers, they will need to make their code work seamlessly with the database management system and with the web interfaces needed to make the application really deliver for its users. Add in the security team and the hardware gurus who will give you the limitations and possibilities you have from a platform perspective and that is a lot of translation going on within an already cramped technical world.
Your technical team cannot function without good projects that come to them from the business planners who run the business. But the top level owners and managers of business departments speak their own language as well - sometimes sniffing rarified air that just isn't ready for everyone else. Their goals and objectives for the projects that they define are couched in what the application will do for the business. In many respects they may not know, understand or care about the technical complications you face to make that application a reality.
Your job as the manager who will make your department or project team successful is to define the projects and goals of upper management in terms of their business language. When you meet with the business leaders who make things happen in your organization, your job will be to understand what the application will do and how it will make the business more successful. The business objectives of the application will be the standards of measurement by which your technical team will be judged. Those objectives will then be "translated" into technical objectives that you can communicate to your project development team. You may wonder who does that translation. That would be you.
Very Different Priorities
While you may be manager of the technical development team, to make them successful, you have to know how to motivate them and make them productive - I can tell you from experience, it isn't a lot of shouting and cursing. While you may work for the upper level business management team, you manage them in a sense because it is up to you to understand their priorities and get them to work with you and not against you for the success of your department. This can be the hardest game to play if that management tier isn't interested or just doesn't 'have time' for teamwork .
The priorities of upper management are business objectives. So the applications you bring back to your team from the top brass will be successful if they make the company more efficient, more profitable or save money through some form of process improvement. So you must understand and speak fluently about those priorities so you can excite management about what your team can do for them. Then you can then gather the details of the business objectives of the applications work to be done so you can take those goals to your technical team.
To say that your technical development team will have different priorities is to understate things dramatically. It isn't that systems developers and "techies" don’t want the company to hit it's business objectives because they do (contrary to the belief of upper management sometimes!). They consider that to be your job and the job of upper management to deal with. The priorities for a systems developer lie in the ongoing development his or her skills, the size and impact of projects that they get to work on and the peace and quiet you can provide to them to continue being "techies" by keeping management "off their backs." There ARE tools to make management less painful. But that's the subject of another post.
The Fine Art of Translation
Much of the real work of being a manager over technical projects is translating business objectives to technical people and technical details to management people. While it is always good management to let your technical team know what the goals are of the project in business terms, to get their "buy in" and to see them really engage the project, they must see it as a technical challenge.
So you will translate each business priority into a technical specification before you begin having meetings with the rank and file development team. That means that the first few phases of the project development life cycle, which is the project definition and needs analysis, are by far the most critical phases. It is in those phases that you will use your ability to speak two languages to lay out a technical solution to a business problem in language that both camps will understand.
Similarly, when you and your team have defined the business problem in technical terms, you will take that solution to your business management team to explain how that solution will take the business where it needs to go. The more you develop your skills at explaining technical solutions to business managers in business terms and explaining business objectives in technical terms to your development team, the more success you will realize as an IT manager. And success is what it is all about after all.
P.S. A bad place to start building bridges is to post this one on the office wall!
Filed Under: Featured • Jobs in Technology
