IT management tips

Will you give up 10 percent of your pay to telecommute?

As gas prices and energy cost keep going up and as technology makes is possible to work from remote locations, will you be ready to give up portion of your pay if you can work from home?

Back in 1999, I had a job as web application tester, I had to commute about 45 min to work on each direction, besides the weekly meeting with software developers, my job was to sit in front of a computer all day long trying to crash the web applications our company was developing, there was no need for me to be in my office, I could take my work home and work from there, and only come to the office when there is a meeting. I asked my boss if it was ok for me to work from home and save me the daily trip I make to work, the idea seemed foreign to him and he said “no.”

Since than, I left my full time job and I started to work on contracts, my company office was my home office, I would conduct my business from home and from my cell phone, and only go to the client site only when needed. Working this way lowered my total take home pay each month, but it:

1- Made me feel more relaxed, I forgot when was the last time I had to drive through morning rush hour
2- Gave me a lot of time to do more social activities that many IT professionals only dream of
3- Made me love my job as IT consultant, when I had corporate job, I would count the minutes till is time to go home
4- Made me make better use of the current technology which makes working remotely possible

So what would you say, take a lower pay for more relaxed life-style?

Your most valuable employee, your secretary

Can your business ever run smoothly without your hard working, know it all secretary? I don’t know when is secretary’s week, but I am sure I will take my secretary to lunch on that week to show her/him how much I appreciate what they do.

Our company’s secretary is out sick today, hope her the best, and we can not find certain files and certain phone numbers. Since I joined my current company and was giving the job to re-organize the company, I have stressed over and over the need for good back up plan in case of an emergency.

Here are few steps you can take to minimize productivity loss while your secretary is out of the office:

1- Have a reliable filing system; this system must guide you to the location of all company’s file. The guide should be easy to understand and follow.
2- A complete phone list of all company’s employees, clients, vendors, etc.
3- A reliable phone and answering system that you can switch to in case there is no one to answer the phones.
4- If you are a small business, make sure all your employees know how the filing system works, how to use the phone system and how to access the phone list.

Some of the above step my sound elementary and you may think every business would already have such plans, but believe me I have seen many many businesses that have no filing system of any type.

Your secretary will always be one of the most valuable employees, if only for the warm and friendly greeting your clients hear over the phone, but while he/she is out, have a plan to keep the office run smoothly.

Do you turn off your computer at night?

As in IT consultant, I am sure you were asked this question many times “Should I turn my computer off at night or when I am not suing it or should I leave it on?”

I think the world is divided on this issue, some tech would tell you to turn if off and other would say, including myself, if you are a heavy computer user, never turn it off.

Turning the computer on and off each time would wear out its components, just like a car, if you turn it off each time you stop at the red light, you would harm the engine and other components.

But now, there is the issue of reducing energy use and green IT, is it better to turn off the computer when is not in use, or is it better to put it on standby mood or sleep mood? What would consume less energy? And if we have hundreds of computers, how much energy we would save verses how much tear and wear these computers would suffer for each start up procedure?

I don’t know the right answer, but I leave my laptop on most of the time, I still believe that power on procedure or start up takes a lot of energy to complete.

Few bad habits that kill small business

After graduation from college, most of the jobs that I worked at were with small businesses. I believe I have learned most of my skills in management and organization form working with small businesses.

Almost at every small business I worked at, I noticed the following few bad habits, that in some instances led to the closing of the business:

1- To save money, most small businesses start with not well trained staff
2- Working at small business, some staff members don’t understand that the benefit system at the small business is not like the one they can find at large corporations and many small business owners fail to explain this to the new hires
3- Many small business owners based their business plans on hope more than on facts
4- In order for the small business to survive, each employee will have to do more than his/her share of work, sometimes employees have to go out of their way to make things happen, but some employees don’t understand that and only want to do what they were hired to do
5- Many small businesses were started by successful engineers, IT professionals, investors, etc, but these individuals were not successful at running a business and eventually the business went down

These are the few bad habits or bad signs that I have seen at few small businesses that I worked at.

Templates from Microsoft for your small business

I am not a big fan of Microsoft office, but Microsoft owns the world as my professor used to say. Microsoft website is full of productivity tools that are available for free.

There are plenty of templates ready for use by small business owners, below is only a small list of what you can find at Microsoft site:

Business plan for startup business
Bank loan request for small business
Projected balance sheet
Personal financial statement
Four-year profit projection
Start-up expenses
Opening day balance sheet
Financial history and ratios
12 month profit and loss projection
12 month sales forecast
Competitive analysis

You can download these templates and many more at:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/default.aspx

Smart management not cheap management

As business managers, we all care about reducing costs and maximizing profit, we look for ways to acquire assets at the lowest possible cost. One of my clients who I do consulting work for have the habit of buying used supplies including computers. He gives me a lot of work trying to fix his network that runs on old used computers. I asked him many times why he keeps buying old computers while by spending few hundreds extra dollars he can get himself new computers? He said “I run an insurance company and most of the time my staff uses the computers only to fill forms online, I don’t need new computers with extra features that I will never use.”

I understand his reasoning, but I also understand that old machines will keep breaking and his maintenance bill will keep going up.

This client has many offices that I do network and computer maintenance work for, so one day I told him “lets start buying new computers for one of your offices and see how this will reduce your maintenance cost”, he agreed and we got new computers for that particular office, and the results amazed him, his maintenance and network support calls for that office went to almost zero, and he was able to recover the cost of the new computers from the saving he made by not losing work hours due to network down time and not having to pay for network troubleshooting.

At my current consulting job, we have the same problem, some off brand computers that breaks every few days and not reliable web hosting company for our e-mail services. Now again, I am starting to clean up this company and show the management how they can save by investing in good equipment and reliable services, even if the cost is bit high, but it will pay-off later.

Rising Oil prices and cost management

The continues hike in oil prices is not going to stop anytime soon, if your business is directly affected by oil price fluctuations, it would be a wise decision to plan your budget around higher oil prices.

Many businesses, especially small businesses, may psychologically, get affected by hearing the news of higher oil prices and start to worry about their bottom line.

But as a business you got to look at your numbers. As a consultant who uses the internet and the phones extensively in his work, I saw a sharp decline in my communications bill, from almost $1000 a month to below $100 a month, that’s 90% decrease in cost.

This is only one example of how costs are dropping for other services. Having your employees work remotely from home is another example of cost saving method you can utilize, by having your employees work from home, you can cut on many types of costs associated with the office environment such as (office rent, utilities bills, commuting time, etc.)

The costs of few commodities may be rising, but the overall cost of doing business is dropping.

Fleet management tips needed

At my current job, I am facing a bit of a challenge managing our company’s fleet of about 70 cars. I have searched the internet for good fleet management software and I found few good software but I am not sure about the quality of these software.

Does anyone know of a good fleet management software?

Challenges that we are facing with our fleet of cars:

1- Rental history
2- Accident history
3- Maintenance history
4- Mileage
5- Cost of ownership
6- Warranty information
7- Checkout and check records

Of course we have some type of records for our fleet, but I like to have a complete control of our fleet where no part of fleet management is over looked.

Does anyone know of good software for fleet management and also any tips in this subject are welcome

Management tips…culture and management

As a successful manager, you must pay close attention to people around you, nothing more exciting for a global manager than learning management styles in different cultures.

One of my biggest challenges with my daily work here in Doha, Qatar (a small Arab state), is communicating with my employees and tell them what is expected from them. People here must be told what to do, if I am late to work one day, the office janitor will not clean my office, I actually have to ask him to do so each morning.

An American colleague, himself as a manager with different company, complained to me one time about his office janitor, he said “the janitor would sit there all morning doing nothing, how can I get him to do his work?”

I told him to print a list of duties he is expecting his janitor to perform and hand it to him, and if that doesn’t work, than he will have to order him to do his work. In the American work culture, workers generally don’t like to be told what to do; there is a general understanding between the management and the workers of what is expected from each side.
Working at global level with very diverse groups of people gives me as a manager a better understanding of various cultures and what to expect from my work force.

I found out that, is this part of the world, it’s ok to give orders to your employees and tell them what to do, in fact, in many cases they are expecting to be told what to do.

How to deal with diversity at work place

Today’s work place is more diverse than ever, even within the small business setting, you would find employees with very diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. In my traveling throughout few countries, I noticed how different cultures deal with diversity at work place.

In some countries, the locals or the citizens of the country always have an upper hand in the workplace, talent and experience come second, in other, talent and experience determined how employees are evaluated.

Smart and futuristic managers always treat diversity as an asset to the company. In today’s ever connected world, your work force will be compromised of people with various backgrounds and learning how to deal with such diverse work force is both challenging and exciting.

In my current job, I am dealing with Asians employees, most if not all of them are on their first international assignment in a foreign country (currently I am working in the Arab state of Qatar.) What did I learn working with this diverse group of people?
The first thing I noticed, the how they write their resumes (CVs), the usual resume has so much personal information that I found it bit more than what I need to know about the employee. Most resumes contain information such as (birth city, martial status, passport number, how many kids and religion.)

Most of the employees are not out-spoken and they don’t communicate their objectives clearly, so when I started to work with my new company, I really had to sit with my staff few times to learn more about their objectives and also to find more about their skills.

Usually, the employees won’t take initiatives on changing the work environment, the initiative must always come from the management, so as a manager, I learned not to wait for my employees to come to me with their ideas and problems, but I have to go to them.

Although the employees require close supervision, which makes it hard on the management, they are hard working and usually do what they asked to do.

The work environment and local laws here give so much power to the management, although that is changing now, which may intimidate some employees, as a manager, I am trying to strike a balance between employees rights and responsibilities.

I am dealing with a work culture that I have not experienced before, but with little patience and good coaching, I am able to get a lot from my employees.