What I did last year

I've worked for nearly 1 year now at my current job, as head of IT. Time to make a summary of the improvements I have helped achieve (credit goes to as much to the team and the company as to myself!):

• the team used have at least as many projects as there were people. Everybody basically worked on their own projects. I changed this by introducing two teams, one focused on front end work and one on .net project development. Every project was tackled by the team, not by an individual. The number of simultaneous projects became limited to a two or three.


• the IT department had a bad name with regards to completing work. In fact, it was hard to name a project that was completed on time and on budget, if completed at all. There were projects of a couple of months running for over three years. Together with the team, I introduced Kanban, focused on limiting work in progress, made sure small pieces of business value were delivered as soon as possible, made work in progress visible. The IT mission statement became "we deliver" and the team set a target for the year in terms of number of rolled out projects which they though was ambitious, but which they had already made after the first 3-4 months.


• Evaluations were a mess and severly demotivating for the team members. Basically, the former heads of IT would grade everybody once a year on 16 ill defined criteria, using an ill defined score between 1-10. That's 160 scores you have to give meaning to! I got rid of this pointless exercise by developing a 360 degree evaluation together with the team and carrying this out every quarter. This meant that team members gave each other a grade along with feedback, and also that the company at different levels gave feedback to the IT team as a whole. I as head of the department still give a grade on three criteria. This was a compromise as I would rather not have graded people at all, not even via 360, as grades are by definition demotivating.


• Instead of a yearly evaluation, or even half yearly as it has become, I sit with every team memeber in a 1-1 every three weeks. this gives short feedback times and ample opportunity to discuss how things are going. By the time the evaluations take place, there are no surprises for anyone.


• The salary increase process was unclear, there was no direct link to the evaluation process. I improved this process by making explicit what grade led to which salary increase, and by defining the various salary scales more clearly, especially how one moved from one scale to another.


• The IT department was primarily being outsourced to another company for development. Although the company claimed that IT was one of the three pillars, there was virtually no interaction between IT and the rest of the company. I started up a process of developing an IT strategy together with the team and company, and created projects that focused on automating manual work that non-IT employees did, as well as projects that directly supported the main business of the company and their customers.


• One of the main concerns the company owners had was that there were single points of knowledge/failure in the IT team. I resolved these bottlenecks by making everyone work as a team, doubling up the technical expertise, and promoting knowledge exchange.


• The morale of the IT team was low. By introducing team sessions, retrospective meetings, 1-1 sessions, team activities, trainings, and conferences, the morale has improved dramatically. The team has clearer goals, more control over it's own work and planning, and it's work is more visible within the company.


• I have grown the team from 6 to 8, with 2 people moving on in the mean time. I introduced a new interview process, consisting of a first meeting with me and HR, followed by a four hour hands-on workshop, and then a final meeting with the company owners. This process has served well to deliver good candidates.


• By estimating projects before hand using story points, by reporting on the used up budget during the project, and by evaluating the final used hours vs budget afterwards, the estimation process has become much more transparent. By enforcing that all estimates are made by more than one person, and by people who will do the work, the budgets are beginning to be met. Before, almost all projects went over budget, although nobody talked about it.


• The average grade given by company management to the IT team has increased by 45%


• I arranged that we are now Microsoft Silver partner, and this has sigificantly reduced the licensing costs of the entire company.