New Manager

pixa241

I recently got promoted to a manager of the Server team. We manage all the servers, virtualization, backups, and storage. We inherited a pretty bad environment and we have made some great strides to fix a lot of things. What are some thing current managers can do or advice for me. Did you come up with any 5 year plan to refresh servers, or something like that. Just looking for pointers and things I could do.

UncleB

pixa241 wrote: »

We inherited a pretty bad environment and we have made some great strides to fix a lot of things. What are some thing current managers can do or advice for me. Did you come up with any 5 year plan to refresh servers, or something like that. Just looking for pointers and things I could do.

If this was my role I would start with documenting the current state of things and the risks this poses to the business. This shows how bad it was as people soon forget it when you get it improved and it will help come appraisal time to establish your value.

Next - perform a SWOT analysis to show you have looked at a bigger picture than just the tech and know what you have to work with:
How to Perform SWOT Analysis

Gather information on things such as the strategy of the company (any of the exec team should be able to give this to you) and the IT strategy (if you have an IT director or similar) so you know how your changes need to align to follow what the business is doing.

Based on the company strategy, research the best value solutions and integrate the best options into your future strategy (revise the strategy with the appropriate director if needed) and find something that will actually make it easier and more effective for IT to respond to the needs of the business.

Now start prioritizing the changes you want to make at as high a level as you can, detailing the alignment to strategy to justify them. Price them too and detail training needs to get investment if needed. Consult with your management often at this stage and make them feel involved as they probably have more insight than you and are the ones empowered to enable and reward you.

A bit of project management skills are needed now so if you are not familiar with this, call in some expertise and work out the resourcing, costs, dependencies and impact of the changes you want to make and get the tasks lined up on a Gantt chart so you can understand how it can all work out.

Now get sign off from the budget owners, motivate your team and allocate roles & tasks. Realise you are probably in line for a big promotion or bonus because of the way you approached this, or can at least get a much better new job on the basis of it.

That would be my recommendation.

If you love the challenge then start looking at the architect roles as a possible career choice - they can pay really well and give awesome experiences.

jelevated

Make your expectations clear as day. Give your guys measurable targets a la SLAs, compliance metrics for your systems (for stuff they have responsibilities for).