The Best IT Advice I Ever Got

We were “two peas in a pod.”
I miss this man terribly, but am immensely thankful for his wisdom.
(I know I usually make jokes in these, but not this time. Sorry.)

My grandfather was the most influential person in my life. Though in just over it month it will have been twenty years that he’s been gone, he continues to have an indelible mark on me. Sometimes when I look in the mirror or see a picture of myself – I see him. I mean that literally, in that apparently though he accounts for only 25% of my genetic makeup, I do not resemble the other side of my family nearly as much.

While I could talk at length about how he in many cases provided guidance (and guardrails) for my life or why we named our firstborn son after him, today I want to focus on one piece of advice he gave me without even knowing he was giving it to me. First, some background on his career: He started his professional career as airborne artillery paratrooper in the US Army. After he left the service he went on to build tires while he put himself through night school using the GI bill and gained successive promotions until he was the overall general manager for a large business unit of General Tire. The point I’m making here is that he was responsible for the overall profit and loss of a reasonably large company.

“Steve,” I can hear you saying, “I work in IT, and not at a rubber or tire company! What on earth does this have to do with me?” A fair question, for sure, but please hear me out. I think you’ll get something out of this.

Every so often, Paps (I called him Paps – short for Papaw – though his name was Bill) would tell me some fun stories about his career or interesting business stories. One time, he told a story about his personnel manager (in those days, they didn’t have language as delicate as “Human Resources”) who came into his office upset about how timesheets were being completed and reported on.

“Bill,” the personnel manager was saying, “every week my department has to comb through all of the time cards and add the columns up to see if they go over 40 hours so we can pay overtime. The new time cards we put in clearly have a line for overtime. We have got to get foremen to use the new line. It’s taking hours every week and driving my staff crazy.” Keep in mind while reading that this was in the 70s. They had paper… everything back then.

“Phil,” my grandfather said (and actually, I don’t know the personnel manager’s name, so I’m going with ‘Phil’) do me a favor and come over here.” My grandfather’s office was apparently overlooking the parking lot. He got up and walked to the window as Phil came to join him. “See all those people?” It was conveniently at shift change so hundreds of people were streaming in and out of the building. “Those people,” Paps continued, “do not come to work every day so that you have someone to do punch cards for. They come here to build tires - because we sell tires.” The odds of you knowing my grandfather are very slim, but if you did, you’d know for certain that the punchline was moments away. “You,” he emphasized intensely, “serve them. So you can either figure out how to make the process easier and better for your department, or you can get all of our employees to willingly buy-in - but complaining about them isn’t going to be tolerated any longer.”

Ouch. I don’t know what happened to Phil, but I’m sure he went home and yelled at his kids unnecessarily or something that evening. The story never had an epilogue. “Steve,” I can hear “I’ve been patient enough. I don’t build tires. I implement complex data infrastructure. I certainly don’t work in HR.” Okay, fair enough - but I want to play this conversation out in a way that we’d all relate to.

Let’s pretend for a minute that you work in my company and you come to my office, upset about how folks are breaking your advanced and expensive new analytics dashboard app. “Steve,” you say to me, “these users keep screwing up the app. We made it plain as day, but each time they try to upload the source data file, they screw it up and we have to go in and manually back out their addition to the database before it gets committed. It’s driving us nuts!”

There are downsides to an office with a window

I nod and ask you to come to the window. “Reader,” I say in a slightly perturbed tone “my office has no view of anything other than dumpsters. But if it did, we’d see people, probably. And those people do not come to work so you have some computers to work on. You serve them.”

And there it is. It’s as easy to get your head around as anything we’ve ever talked about. I get that you’re having a problem in your app, but that problem is not your user’s problem. It’s your job to make the app more resilient, to handle errors better. It is not incumbent upon your users – who are your company’s most valuable asset – to bend to your app’s functionality. The same can be true of infrastructure. It’s your job to make sure that the infrastructure supports those that make, market, and sell your company’s products or services. It is not their job to make your job valuable. It’s your job to make your job valuable. This is just as true in IT in 2020 as it was in personnel in 1972.

The best IT people I know get this intrinsically – they live it out every day on the job. The worst are constantly complaining about users. And you’ve probably heard them do it: “This job would be great if it wasn’t for all the users.” I sincerely hope it isn’t you saying that. If it is, you need to take a step back and re-evaluate the role of IT in a business. And while I’m steadfast that IT can provide real business value and improvements to both top line and bottom line numbers, you can never get yourself or your team in the position to do so if you can’t first get to the point where you serve the existing business really well and grow that trust in the relationship.

The beauty of this is that it’s really simple to understand and act on. We’ve talked before about the importance of knowing why you’re doing something or asking someone else to do something, and the reason we have IT at all. It all ties together. IT should make your business more competitive. You do that by serving the business well, and you should be able to communicate to anyone - be it a boss or your aunt at a cookout - how your work ties back to the mission and objectives of the company.

If you can do that, then you’re well on your way to providing real and lasting value for your employer. And that is always good for your career.

On to you:

• When is the last time you heard someone complaining about end-users? What did you think about that?

• What processes, features, or apps that you are responsible for annoy your customers or end-users? What can you do to fix them?

• If you don’t know what’s annoying your end-users, when’s the last time you asked in a formal way? Do you have a process to get feedback on functionality?