Rowing on a similar boat here. Was SysAdmin for 6 years, was promoted to IT Manager almost a whole year ago. One book that hasn't been mentioned yet: "Managing Humans" by Michael Lopp. Little nuggets of my own wisdom: - The whole "aligning the department with company goals" really means: if the people under you are doing stuff that doesn't help anyone in the company, they need your help to be re-focused on working on things that have some sort of impact: better performance, less user errors, higher stability and/or redundancy, documentation, etc. - Reporting to higher-ups comes down to 2 basic methods: numbers and trends (examples: tickets coming into the IT department each week, phone call volume, web traffic, etc); or a list that consists of all the things that need to be done, and the ones that you can't currently afford to do because of budget, personnel or time constraints, and the consequences of neglecting these things that need to be done. (example: List of 20 things that need to be done. Current capacity allows to be doing only 15 of them, and you've chosen to neglect 5 of them, explaining why and when they will be addressed). - Risk mitigation. Everything's eventually going to fail, so focus goes into what would have the biggest impact or is expected to fail first.
Of course, this all goes with more than a grain of salt since I'm a newbie at IT management too. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
