How to Create a Calm, Ordered and Process-Driven IT Organization

Calm.

Ordered.

Process-driven.

Three qualities that define an ideal IT environment.

And yet, most IT environments are tense, chaotic, and operate within a swirl of ad-hoc solutions to the day’s burning problems.

What creates this gap between the controlled IT environment we all want to operate within, and the unmanageable environment most IT departments actually work within?

A simple—but hard to admit—fact…

Right now, most people in your organization feel very comfortable with how things are.

1. Many IT professionals get hired and promoted because they are really good firefighters. As a result, most IT departments are stocked with people who thrive under perpetual motion and reactivity. They may grumble about things being chaotic, but constant firefighting makes them feel validated and they have a tough time believing their stakeholders really want a calm and orderly environment. 
2. Your business stakeholders love feeling like IT will respond immediately to their requests. It’s not the most effective or efficient way to solve problems, but your stakeholders are accustomed to swinging by IT, setting a fire, and walking away feeling immediate gratification knowing your people will scramble to put it out.

For both sets of people—IT professionals and their stakeholders—the chaotic environment has become the status quo. Both sets have found a sense of validation from the chaos, and—even though nobody thinks it’s ideal–everyone feels comfortable operating within it.

If you’re going to implement any large-scale efforts to introduce calm, order and process into your IT environment, you first need to break up everyone’s entrenched comfort with chaos. And you can only do that by giving everyone—your boss, your colleagues, your team members and your business stakeholders—a taste of how much more comfortable a calm, ordered, process-driven IT environment feels.

Once they have this taste, they will crave more of it, emboldening you to systematically create a greater sense of control within the IT environment. But before you can do that, you need to give everyone their first feeling that not only can IT operate differently, but IT can operate better.

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ACTION STEPS

Pick one of the following calm, ordered processes, and implement it over the next two weeks:

–Set up quarterly check-ins to confirm priorities.

–Schedule meetings months before you need them.

–Use the issues log to turn firefighting into fire prevention.

–Pitch organizational changes within a standard framework.