It Management: Get Started with Help from Two Experienced Joes

Congratulations, you have been hired into your first IT Manager role! Now what?

Most people in IT management roles have come up through the ranks in one of the technical teams. Oftentimes, individuals with exceptionally strong technical skills eventually end up in an IT management role. However, the transition from technical staff to management is one of the toughest transitions for IT professionals.

To help new IT Managers, we asked two regular IT management Joes—Joe Roush and Joe Hertvik—to provide practical advice on making the change from tech professional to tech manager. Here’s what they said and how it can help you with your IT management journey.

Align with strategy & goals

Joe Roush: Aligning IT capabilities with organizational strategy and goals is probably the most difficult aspect of IT management. Instead of all your focus being on server capacity or quality code, you must now look at how those technical solutions benefit the organization. Senior leadership will expect this of you now as well. You’ll need to learn to:

• Speak in terms of organizational benefit
• Describe IT investments as improving organizational capabilities

Any good investment ask should answer:

• What your team has built/accomplished thus far
• What you need funding for
• What the funding will do and how long it will take to provide results (Be specific!)
• How needed and great the results will be
• Which people have already made an investment (For instance, the team members who’ve done research or previously worked with those tools can talk about how this helped a similar project.)

Joe Hertvik: Unless you’re running a one-man shop, stop being the best technician in the shop. Your new job isn’t programming apps, configuring the network infrastructure, or setting up servers. Your job is to organize, strategize, define, direct, and control IT software and hardware infrastructure to do two things:

1. Enable, meet, and report on organizational goals using digital technology
2. Create value for the business

Instead of being a rock star technician, you’ll be guiding, directing, and coaching rock star technicians to create organizational value. You’re now a member of the management staff responsible for IT resources. It’s a significant and important perspective shift, but it’s a critical shift that needs to be made.

Invest in yourself

Joe Roush: New managers often feel overwhelmed with their new responsibilities. The single most important thing you can do as a manager is continually invest in yourself. I have found that the best way to increase your (and your teams) productivity is to keep learning:

• Read management books.
• Seek out professional development opportunities.
• Get a mentor and become a mentee.
• Ask for funding to go to conferences.
• Even writing helps.

Joe Hertvik: I agree you should invest in yourself and get more training. Give priority to sharpening your management-oriented skills to supplement your technical skills. Take IT project management training. Learn budgeting, reporting, coaching, staff management, and leveraging IT for strategic advantage. Read IT management articles along with tech journals.

Learn more about your organization’s core business, its needs, and how digital technologies can help fulfill those needs. Take any management training your business offers, so you can speak in the business’s language.

You’re in the wheelhouse now, not the engine room. Learn wheelhouse skills.