IT managers

A CV or A Resume

What format should a job seeker use? In North America, the resume is the common format job seeker use to tell about their job experience and education. The Resume usually dose not includes so much personal information as the CV does.

Being in India and in the Arab world for the last few months, I have seen many CVs per my job as development manager. What I really didn’t like about the CV format is the personal bio data, most of the CVs that I have read contain so much personal information, in one CV, the applicant included the name of her mother and father and their occupations in the CV and its not unusual to see the applicant passport number listed in the CV too.

I have always wondered as a manager, why do I need to know this much personal details of the applicant, my major concern is the applicant actual experience.

One of my employees asked me to review her CV, there was almost half page of information about her bio, so I told her, any busy manager will not be interested in your bio, he wants to know more about your job experience and if he needed more bio information, he will ask for it.

I don’t know if it’s a cultural issue or not, but mostly in the US, its almost illegal to ask so much bio data of your employees, but in this part of the world, privacy is still not a big issue.

Finish what you have started

What is the distinguishing character of the most successful people? They finish what they have started.

Good business plans are only good if they are fully implemented. Many businesses started with great ideas only to see these businesses fail, they had a plan, they started to work on the plan, but they didn’t follow through.

When the management fails to emphasize the importance of following through, employees will not follow through on their job performance.

In the past few months, I had several incidents where I didn’t get excellent customer service support. In one of my international flights with a world class airlines, I had to change my destination after I checked in my luggage, only to find out later that my bags didn’t not arrive with me on the same flight. I have talked to the airlines customer agent and explained to him in full details about my intentions to change my flight routes and he re-assured me over and over that my checked in luggage will be with me on the same flight, but later on I found out that this agent didn’t not do his job thoroughly and he didn’t not rely the message to the ramp agent to pull the luggage from one flight and load into another.

In another incident, I had a tech support issue so I called the tech support line, only to talk with half trained technicians who kept giving me different answers for the same issue, a very simple problem that kept going on week after week which eventually took less than one minute to fix.

If these customer support representatives were told in their training that once they take an ownership of an issue, they must follow it through until it has been resolved, they would have paid better attention to the customer who is waiting on the other side of the line and they could have save their companies time and money.

Finish what you have started and follow through with your commitments and you will see how success will follow.

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.

What your job title says about you

Recently; I had to fill some forms pertaining to my job skills and experiences, I never really had to do that before, I was always hired for the job based on personal interviews.
On the forms that I have to fill, there are a list of job titles that supposed to match my experience and educational backgrounds. Some of the job titles that I need to choose from and are listed under Information Systems Analysts and Consultants are:

1- IT (information technology) consultant
2- computer consultant
3- computer systems analyst
4- management information systems (MIS) analyst
5- systems auditor
6- systems consultant
7- systems security analyst
8- computer analyst
9- computer consultant

I always referred to myself as IT consultant, my educational backgrounds are on the MIS (Management Information Systems) area and my work experiences is ranging from working as desktop support tech working on various support issues, to working on servers, to software testing, to working on network setup and troubleshooting.

I want to know what other IT Consultant think of their job title and do all the titles listed about fall under on big tile of Systems Analysts and Consultant?

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.

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

Be loud, clear and consistent…the problem with miscommunication

We are in the communications age (Internet, e-mails, cell phones, text messages, video conferencing.. etc), but we are still having problems getting hold of people when we need them and still having our message mis-understood by the receiving party.

In my office environment I need to repeat myself few times before my message is understood, I use e-mails and face to face meeting, but still if I am not loud and very clear, my message get lost in the daily office work or at best it get misunderstood.

We rely so much on electronic communications, we usually think once we send that e-mail or leave that voice mail, the other party will get the message and act upon it. In the past, I would rely on e-mails and voice mails thinking that once I managed to send an e-mail or leave a voice mail message, my job was done and I will remove that task from my to-do list. But it seems that with the wide spread of technology and the massive use of e-mails; people are less inclined to treat e-mails with the importance once they did.

So, as a manager, I have to make sure my message understood, I usually have a face to face meeting regarding important issues to make sure my points were delivered and if face to face meeting is not possible, I will request a reply to my e-mail or voice message and If I don’t get a meaningful reply, I will assume my message was not understood.

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.

Are you a slow or a fast decision maker?

Being a manger or a business owner, you have to make decisions on daily basis. What is your strategy on decisions making? When do you delegate the decision making authority and when do you have to make your own decisions?
As a manager, you have to develop a policy where some decisions must be made on the spot while other should be made after careful study.
In my current job as consultant and business manager, I had to come up with a policy for decision making, the company decision making process was real slow and centralized, I had to change that to save time and make things move quicker.

Generally, I sort out the decision making into two categories:
1-Decisions that have minor consequences: you can delegate your staff members to make those decisions that will have minor impact on your company if the wrong decision was made, you will need little efforts to correct the consequences of the wrong decision and if there was any financial lose, it would be minimal.
2-Decisions that have major consequences: these decisions will have to be made by upper management where the consequences of making a mistake are costly.

This is not a real comprehensive guide on decision making process; this is only a little tip to help speed up the decision making process.

Successful managers

Nothing more rewarding in your career as a manager than the feeling of love and respect you get form your employees. Managing is not an easy task, successful managers are like leaders, they are responsible for the well-being of their countries and their people.

Managing is more than a job and responsibilities; it’s about building relations, if you are managing a group of workers it’s real crucial to build in engaging relationship with them.
I have seen real boost in morals and productivity levels when:
1-Managers listen
2-Managers keep their promises
3-Managers treat each employee as a valuable asset to the company
4-Managers are easy to approach and talk to
5-Managers give timely and honest feedbacks to employees
6-Managers take responsibility and remain calm in time of crises
7-Managers participate with employees in social activities out side the work place
8-Managers help employees advance in their careers
9-Managers communicate employees concerns to upper management
10-Managers are polite, but firm on their demands
11-And finally managers are the best at their jobs

This list is not comprehensive, but I have practiced the above points when ever I had to manage a group of employees and it always gave me positive results and in some instance a life-time friendship.