IT Management

anything I don't mind

anything I don't mind

anything I don't mind

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Anyone work in IT management at the moment? I work as a sysadmin at the moment but considering making the move to IT management in the coming years. At the moment i do a lot of the management roles without getting paid for it. The only thing i have not done yet is deal with the budget and managing people. Although I do have experience managing a support desk at least unofficially.

Any thoughts on what i should study to get more knowledge about budgets and IT management and would any one argue that it is a bad move for someone who is more technical, should i focus on technical side instead?
 
Yes, and I love it!

It's probably different for everyone, but for me I don't feel like I'm actually at work. For the first time it's me making the decisions, not following some idiots orders.

I was getting very frustrated working with prats (in the IT industry there are many) so when I finally snapped I took a management job, increased my salary by 20k over three years and never looked back.

Being a senior IT engineer with 20 years experience in some of the top companies in the UK helped quite a lot.

Best job I've ever had

Budget planning is great if you like spending money lol Last week I spent a million pounds on san/server infrastructure and a new cisco phone system. The best managers are those who have worked their way up the ladder, who have hands on technical experience. If not, you are trusting other people which may or may not be the right advice. When the directors call you in the explain why a site has gone offline, you can't use the excuse "johnny on third line told me to do it"......you need to plan in High Availability to ensure uptime despite systems failing. It's fantastic fun!

Just say bye bye to your personal life, but if you love it as much as I do, you really don't care

The only thing I was hesitant about was standing up in front of people giving presentations. I'm not great at public speaking, but surprisingly I got used to it very quickly and now it doesn't bother me
 
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groen, your last work thread was about how your boss was getting fed up with you turning up late and hungover and why you thought that this was his fault, and you hated your job which was why you drank too much and stayed up too late which made it actually his fault that you were late, surly and non productive.

You sure about a step into management?
 
I manage 1st, 2nd, 3rd line teams across three uk sites, two other uk companies, and one international plus handle all the external providers.

No management training, no itil, no prince, no project management, I just get on with the work and the difference I have made over the last two years has been quite significant.

I've completely turned around what was a failing IT system and department into one which is well thought of.

In the interview I concentrated more on my technical ability/experience and the things I would change to swing things around for the company. They were more interested in that, than a piece of paper with qualifications on. That said, I do have technical ones such as mcse etc etc

I'm sure most companies may well look for prince2 and the like, but in all honesty most places don't really know what they want. You have to convince them.

The best piece of advice I can give, would be to surround yourself with people you trust.....especially external providers. You need someone you trust on the end of the phone to help out in the event of something going bang

If you have a san infrastructure in place which suddenly shuts down, and the internal resource is unable to bring it back, you need that someone to call to come onto site quickly to resolve the issue. Get your support contracts sorted out and your future years roadmaps in place and everything from then on is a piece of cake. Break down big projects into bite sized chunks and set milestones. It's easy after the first year :-)
 
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ok thanks glen8. I think i will look at starting somewhere relatively small first, around 100 users.

The only thing I am not sure about is managing people as that is the aspect i am least looking forward if i did go in to management.
 
ask your boss or his boss for a review... ask if you can move into a team leader position or if you can lead/manage a project - if you've been there for a while and are reliable then they ought to give you a shot at taking on some responsibility and having some others reporting to you even if temporarily. That gets you the experience of managing people... you're then in a better position to push internally for a permanent team lead or management role.

You could always throw yourself in the deep end too... play up any current 'management' experience to another employer and try to move directly into a management role - if you're confident you can do it then might be worth a shot... but it is a bigger risk and you might be better off trying to push for extra responsibility where you are now before making that sort of leap... obviously if the job doesn't emerge eventually in your current place then you're going to have to jump ship at some point
 
anything I don't mind said:
ok thanks glen8. I think i will look at starting somewhere relatively small first, around 100 users.

The only thing I am not sure about is managing people as that is the aspect i am least looking forward if i did go in to management.
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It's easier in a new place as nobody knows you. You can't really be friends with the people you manage. It gets messy

The hardest thing is giving people a telling off. The amount of people in IT who treat it as a strict 9-5 job is staggering. They make a change at 5, go home only to find out it's broken 8 oclock the next day :D Implement a great helpdesk system with change request procedures. Then you know what's going on :-)

Make a skills matrix of the staff, set personal targets, include both company funded training and self study, assign responsibilities such as:

Person A - Backups and RDS Servers (Primary)
Person B - Backups and RDS Servers (Secondary)

may not be possible in small IT departments, but you need the skills in place, and cover for holidays and sickness. It's always good to have an external supplier on standby as a kind of 4th line support when needed. This can set alarm bells ringing if the staff think you are looking at out sourcing. Be transparent, open and honest.

youll be amazed at how well this works. People don't like following orders, so make them responsible for a system which they have nurture, develop and be proud of. You can then use that for appraisals

a powerful vision to have is to "reduce the network complexity whilst increasing staff skillsets and their ability to support the systems" When the two meet up you've done a good job
 
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i'm with Magnolia on this, I not sure you're suited to management Groen.

glen8 said:
The hardest thing is giving people a telling off. The amount of people in IT who treat it as a strict 9-5 job is staggering. They make a change at 5, go home only to find out it's broken 8 oclock the next day :D Implement a great helpdesk system with change request procedures. Then you know what's going on :-)
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Agreed, got to do it and be firm though. However if you employ the right people you should be able to keep the tellings off to a minimum.

No changes on a Friday!


may not be possible in small IT departments, but you need the skills in place, and cover for holidays and sickness. It's always good to have an external supplier on standby as a kind of 4th line support when needed. This can set alarm bells ringing if the staff think you are looking at out sourcing. Be transparent, open and honest.
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+1
 
I'm in a similar position.

I'm a senior sys admin, I've been at the company for 14 years along side my boss, the IT manager (Who has been here 17 years) - He's not going anywhere in terms of position which means I realistically cant. I've worked my way up from the bottom to as high as I can go and now I'm looking at more of a management role.

I manage a helpdesk and a couple of people (Including annual appraisals and approve holiday leave for them) - I help my manager do the budgets each year and I have been on a course regarding management years ago (Some NVQ type thing) - I've also had experience of bad employees and have been through an entire disciplinary process (That was exhausting) so feel I'm ready to make the jump, I just don't have a lot of confidence in this kind of thing having been out of the game for so long.

I've basically got comfortable and lazy, but it's hurting my career - and to be fair I've done some pretty big, complicated things including 2 office moves in 1 year! (One move was making sure a shell of a building was completely kitted out in terms of IT)

It's just making that step ...
 
Never go to a job you know you can already do :D
Otherwise you just stagnate.
Learn as you go, and be flexible, then you can make bigger moves more quickly, in my experience.
 
I've managed departments and teams on temporary bases and of course projects most of the time. I've never fancied the people skills involve in it and I know I would miss the hardcore tech side too much.

I currently work in an IT department where there is no offical manager, there's two senior members of staff but we all have a high work ethics and values in us. Decisions are made by group or by the "specialist" in that area, and it works well.

The only issue is forward planning; but the way our company is setup, end users have too much of a say, so it's normally them that request what they need then we will look into providing that service and they foot the bill in their budget. if they belive it's a mulitple department service, it's up to them to find the department(s) to share the costs. Core maintence/upgrades to backbone and servers is spread across all departments. Basically we spend what we need to keep things working and worry about costs later. lol
 
anything I don't mind said:
Anyone work in IT management at the moment? I work as a sysadmin at the moment but considering making the move to IT management in the coming years. At the moment i do a lot of the management roles without getting paid for it. The only thing i have not done yet is deal with the budget and managing people. Although I do have experience managing a support desk at least unofficially.
Click to expand...

This sounds oh so familiar!

Fellow SysAdmin here.
 
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