Information Technology Staffing

• the job titles on your work history do not reflect your experience in business analysis (they include other titles such as programmer, software developer, financial analyst, etc.) and/or;
• you spent many years doing business analysis work for one company (perhaps even with the title of BA), but never obtained post secondary education, and is finding it difficult to get your resume noticed by other companies.

See Part One here.  These deadly sins are not limited to IT Consulting in Cincinnati, but everywhere.  I wish that someone would have shared the list below with me earlier in my career.  It might have saved me a few grey hairs and sleepless nights.  I have to admit, I have been guilty of a couple of these in the past, but that’s why it’s called experience.

5. Blame it on Rio.  And I am not talking about the movie, I am talking about pushing the mistake/error onto something else like, the Operating System, another consultant or worse, one of the client’s employees.  While the problem could very well be any of those things, your job as a professional consultant is to find solutions and to set an example in leadership and even diplomacy.  While you may see glaring errors or mistakes and perhaps your way would have been the better way to do something it is best to keep the criticism and commentary to yourself. (See #3 in Part One)

6. Bubble gum and baling wire.  Many times consultants are brought in to fix something.  The last thing you want to do is to take a shortcut that you aren't sure will last. Band-Aids are fine if you know you are coming back to make a more permanent fix. But eventually, those shortcuts will fail and will need further attention and the time to failure is an unknown. It could be the minute you drive away or months later. This is not the type of chance you want to take. It frustrates the client, and it makes you look bad.  You also don’t want to make the client totally dependent on you.  A client told me once that Peter (not the real name) is very talented; the problem is he is the only one that knows how it works and can manage it.

7. Showing up, Gotta Go. (AKA I gotta hangnail).  Once you’re on a gig, most clients want to see you on some sort of regular basis and some might have a “core hours” expectation.  It’s important for both the client and the consultant to know what each should expect.  I once heard a client make a comment about another consultant that went something like this: “Larry(not the real name) runs out of here all the time and uses sickleave for a hang nail!” 

Here is another list that has some similar ideas here.  I’m sure there are others.  So go forth and sin no more!
 

You have probably heard your parents or grand-parents talk about when they were younger and how they had to walk to school, up hill both ways.  When they shared this story with you it was to prepare you for times when things weren’t so easy and to provide you with their knowledge and advice from their hard earned experience. I wish that someone would have shared the list below with me earlier in my career.  It might have saved me a few grey hairs and sleepless nights.  I have to admit, I have been guilty of a couple of these in the past, but that’s why it’s called experience.

1. Bill for time not worked.  This will be the quickest way to end up out of a consulting gig. Make sure you bill the client only for the time you actually work. This can be tricky if your clients are friends. When you go to a job like this, you know there will be a period of time spent socializing, especially when you first arrive. Don't bill for this time. Start the billing period when you start working.  Sometimes clients will have celebrations during the day.  If you don’t want to appear anti-social, by not going, just don’t bill.  If there are any questions, ask the account manager to find out. If you are the account manager, ask your client manager at one of your one to one meetings if it’s ok to bill.  Some client’s have a culture where that is part of the expectation.

2. Negotiate rates and make deals with the client.  If you work for a consulting firm, you know there are channels for clients to go though to make requests..  Most firms have some sort of account manager to handle those issues.  Direct the client to the account manager.  I had one consultant that actually went so far as to look in the client’s AP system to see how much we were getting paid and then wanted to negotiate a higher rate with the client.  This particular action did not end well for the consultant and he has not been able to be considered for other assignments in this client even when his skill set was ideal.  Never, ever work out a side deal or moonlight with a client this can comprise your integrity and jeopardize the trust between  you, the consulting company and inevitably the client.

3. Act like a prima donna.  Yes, you’re good, that’s why you have been hired. I actually heard a consultant tell the client that their employees were stupid.  Hello? You are there to serve those employees.  You don’t know what kind of constraints they have had to work with.  Hind sight is always 20-20.  Its always far better to politely make suggestions. You may find out your brilliant idea was considered previously and there was a very valid reason for it not being implemented.  It’s much better to NOT have egg on your face or your foot in your mouth.

4. Miscommunicate or undercommunicate when engaged at a client I believe that the client should know what is going on with their project.  Many times I have had to be the bearer of bad news.  I also like weekly status reports to let the client know what I have worked on and what I’m planning on doing.  If at all possible I like to let them know a percent complete.  Years ago, I heard another consultant tell the client he was “unit testing”.  The client assumed that meant he had all the functionality done and was testing.  The reality was he had about 10% of the functionality done and was testing just that one small piece.  When the truth came out, it was not pretty.

Tomorrow I will finish off the last 3 sins.
To be continued……

As I move from client to client, IT shop to IT shop, the one think I notice is that most organizations do not have an internal BA Body of Knowledge.  There are several reasons that I can think of as to why organizations have not taken on the task of developing an internal BABOK:

    1. Companies are slow to embrace the idea and value of a BA Center of Excellence.
    2. Companies do not understand what an internal BABOK is and what should be in it.
    3. Companies have not realized the value of an internal BABOK.
    4. Not enough time, not enough resources.

So let’s take a look at these reasons.  First, creating a BA Center of Excellence would allow the organization to use their BA talent in a more strategic role within the organization.  It would allow them to move their BAs among the business units within the organization with a much less learning curve.  BAs leaving the organization don’t take valuable business knowledge out the door with them and just as important, new BAs have a much shorter ramp up time to become effective to the organization.  I believe once organizations realize the value that developing a BA Center of Excellence can have on the organization, they would all want one.

Secondly, there is reference material available that conceptually describes an internal BA Body of Knowledge, but you would have to dive deep into reading material to find it.  So, let me spell out for all to see what we are talking about when we say an organization should develop an internal BA Body of Knowledge.  This is a centralized, electronic copy of documents that define anything within the business.  This is a wealth of knowledge that all your BAs can draw from to better perform their duties.  This would allow a BA to learn a new area of the business quickly that they have not worked in before as they are assigned new tasks.  This BABOK would define the business organization, the business units with it and the interrelationships between those business units.  What did that sound like to you?  If you said an Enterprise Architecture, you are absolutely correct.  The first thing to include in your internal BABOK is the organization Enterprise Architecture, including all five parts of the architecture.  Also include the BA Career Ladder, BA Competence Model, BA Job Descriptions, new BA training material, BA departure review and BA reference material pertinent to the organization.

Thirdly, now that you understand what wealth of knowledge is included in an internal BABOK, I think you can realize the value of it without me saying a word.  Most organizations do not have an Enterprise Architecture, let alone an internal BABOK.  Those organizations that somewhat have one; usually have it dispersed all over the company network, which makes finding material very difficult.  Centralized, easy to access, electronic, included in the company’s backup and restore process adds tremendous value to the organization.

Lastly, this is always the reason that many good ideas do not take form.  Realize, that if you had an internal BABOK that your BAs used on a daily basis that research tasks take a lot less time.  This can decrease project schedules, freeing up more than just BA resource time.

That all sounds nice, but what does it mean to the organization?  Well, there are many benefits to having an Enterprise Architecture and internal electronic BABOK to the organization:

1. Project portfolio in greater alignment with business strategic goals and initiatives
2. Realization of BA talent in a more strategic role
3. New BAs become more effective to the organization faster
4. Ensure enterprise knowledge stays within the organization when BAs leave the organization
5. Starting point for Enterprise Capability Gap Analysis
6. Reference material for new product feasibility studies
7. Reference material for competitive edge analysis
8. Required material for new enterprise software impact analysis

There are many benefits to the BA practice within the organization:

1. Reference material easily available without exhaustive searching
2. Understand BA Competencies important to the organization
3. Understand BA Competencies needed to achieve the next level on the BA Career Ladder
4. Move within the business units of the organization with greater ease and knowledge
5. Needed reference material for Enterprise Analysis activities

Now can your organization survive in these economic times without an internal BABOK?

 

I recently read an article about the state of the IBM “i” and the amount of complaining by IBM application development and business partner folk. I know several RPG application development folk, and it sounds familiar. That made me think about my Java Application development and career. Are there things to complain about, and uncertainty about the future? Yes, but there are 2 reasons why the Java community is in a better place; the business model and the community. Before the IBMers call for a holy war, I said COMMUNITY! I am not talking about the strengths or weaknesses of the hardware or software. The business model for IBM is that they make the hardware and software, and partner for the sales and service. I think that is a viable model until IBM competes in the sales and services with their partners. If a lead is brought in by a small partner, they are awarded by giving the business to someone bigger. This sets up a confrontational relationship between IBM, the big partners, and the little partners. IBM can also decide whether or not you are worthy to be a partner. Why does this affect the software application development team? Because most consulting firm are selling SERVICES not HARDWARE. If they are not seeing business because of political fighting, they don't have to sell it. There are viable options on other platforms, where interference does not happen. IBM never fostered a community, they created a hierarchy with themselves as the head.

Certainly Sun has done some things that made myself and others unhappy. Besides, complaining, we actively pushed to remove barriers in our path. We do have an open source Java. Is there a IBM community that can work with RPG to make it work for them? I also think its about scale and timing. It's not like IBM software developers have their own AS/400 at their home. It's easy for me to create and use nearly any kind of application at my home in Cincinnati, and pretty cheaply. It makes it fun to tell non-technical people about my application development. Nobody but accountants want to hear about accounting programs. Java, and newer languages have grown up with the Internet. I have friends from all over the globe that have similar interests. If I have a problem, I can go online to a forum, friend, or web page to find what I need. I can read and write blogs to voice my opinion (like now). These things are not ingrained in the Legacy community, and in fact, have been actively campaigned against. It is my belief that any software, hardware, or service will die when there is no vocal community to support it.

• Network security specialist: A person familiar with intrusion detection systems.
• Penetration testers: Someone who can assess a system's potential vulnerabilities.
• Incident handlers: People who understand attack methodology and can apply critical thinking skills to respond to incidents.
• Forensics Analyst: The person who looks for evidence after an attack.
• Research Analyst: The person to keep abreast technological advances in incident response activities.
• Team Leader: Leads the team through crises and communicates to the business incident activities and cost to the business.

• Preparation and Training: for both prevention and incident response.
• Identification: fast identification of an occurring attack and its impact on the IT infrastructure can help in minimizing the duration and cost of clean-up.
• Containment: Once an attack has been identified, steps must be taken to minimize the effects of the attack.
• Recovery and Analysis: The recovery period allows analysis and lessons learned of What happened? Why did it happened? Was the response effective?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2a8TRSgzZY

Check out this video, it’s so dead on.  Many of us in the IT staffing industry have dealt with this first hand.  “I can get <fill in IT skill> resources for $20 an hour less from XYZ".  Companies’ sometimes act like they are buying a commodity product like copier paper, rather than skilled IT consultants. 

No manger would ever dream of going to one of their employees and saying, I can get Bob to do your job for $10,000 less per year, yet it’s becoming more prevalent in the IT staffing business. 

One of the huge issues facing our industry is the use of H1-B IT consultants.  Our leaders in Washington are looking legislation specifically targeting IT consulting firms that use H1-B consultants to limit our ability to do so.  This is in the interest of saving American jobs.  Unfortunately, the bill currently being debated does not limit multi-national companies, so only the smaller companies will be hurt. 
 

I would love to use local IT consultants for all of our engagements, but the price pressure dictates we do things we normally wouldn’t chose to do.   But then again, we’re really just hurting ourselves.

I have written several posts that have talked about various IT strategies.  More often than not, we practice what we preach.  Star Base, Inc has been around for almost 18 years, so we would fall into what I would call a “mature company” category. 

I have always been determined not to be the cobbler’s children with no shoes, so we have invested in systems over the years.  Our CRM system was starting to show its age and even though business is down, I decided to invest in a new system.  Our new system is actually more than a CRM; it’s a fully integrated HRM (Human Resource Management) and accounting system as well. 

We are still learning about all the capabilities, but a couple that I think are really powerful are resume parsing and email capture.   Part of our business is IT staffing and that requires us to track a lot of resumes.  Our new system automatically parses IT skills out and creates a profile for the person.   It also monitors our email; any message received from someone in our system is automatically logged for that contact. 

Cincinnati and Dayton tend to be more conservative than other parts of the country.  Because of this, a lot of companies tend to have older IT solutions.  Could new web application development give you a competitive advantage that would allow you to leapfrog?

“I have a great idea; let’s bring in an IT consultant.”  “Terrific idea, we can let him/her gather the requirements for us.  If he/she is fast enough, maybe we can have them do some of the coding as well.  We might even get him/her to do all of the application development. “   “Those IT Consultants can do it all; they certainly get paid enough.”

I’m sometimes surprised about some of the perceptions about consulting, but perhaps I shouldn’t be.  A few months ago I was talking about Perception = Reality.  Even my fellow blogger, Matt Warman had something to say about IT consulting.

The reality is that consultants are people too.  I personally believe that if you’re in an IT position, IT consulting is a great way to go.  In my perfect world, IT consulting offers a way to advance one’s skills and to get experience at a variety of companies.  The problem is the world is not perfect and in today’s environment the line has really blurred between IT consulting and what I would call IT staffing. 

IT staffing is getting more and more commoditized and who would want to have a career in a commodity business?

 

I am back from spring break and finally gotten uncovered from everything that piled up while I was gone.  While on spring break, I had a chance to reflect on how diversified and specialized IT staffing has become.

Much has changed in the IT staffing industry the last few years.  IT skills are much more diverse than they once were.  There is a lot more in IT than just application development.  It used to be common to say that an individual worked in "computers". Today, just about every field involves “working with computers”. Once upon a time, a single individual could do everything from gather requirements to install the application into production.  This diversity of application development for IT means that individuals that may have never thought of themselves as technically-minded can find an IT position that is interesting to them.

Some IT skills are oriented towards creative endeavors such as web site design and Internet marketing. For individuals who love integrating the human touch into their IT skills, these are great choices. Understanding IT through this lens is often times the best option for those whose personality is more artistic than technical.

Individuals who enjoy being the expert in any given situation may wish to pursue user-support as a career option. The IT skills required to be an effective help desk technician are a blend of interpersonal skills, software troubleshooting abilities and hardware knowledge. Troubleshooting software over the phone is one of the most challenging endeavors the IT world offers.

Overseeing the server operations of a company can be an intense, high-stress job but, for those who have developed the right IT skills for the task, it's all in a day's work. These individuals work in the most critical areas of IT, keeping the server-level software running, adding components that increase the business's IT assets and making sure that the company is protected from the constantly-evolving threats to security.   Often these positions require an individual to work “non-standard” hours and offer some degree of flexibility.

There are some IT jobs that can seem, at times, to be downright magical. These individuals design, deploy and maintain business applications and networking technology. These are the people who can take complex tasks and automate them so just a mouse click is all that are needed.   They read server logs as if they were written in plain English, can fix just about any problem and who can design innovative solutions that allow companies to get the most out of their software and hardware investments.

A lot of these positions are performed by an outside contractor or IT consultant who comes into a business and makes everything work as if it were an orchestra being conducted by a skilled hand.
 

Organizations that build strong value-driven cultures frequently achieve high performance.  The values that are developed must touch every department in the organization or the overall operation will fall short of its targeted goals.

As an IT consulting firm in Cincinnati, we see many different approaches from many different companies and it is the “out-of-the-box thinkers that seem to continually apply lateral thought process on a continual basis and always stay a few steps ahead of their competition.

One would think that IT departments would observe and learn from this but way too often they do not pay attention to the business drivers of the organization and continue to stay with the same IT infrastructure year in and year out and resist change on any level.

There are those that would argue that “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it” and I agree to a point but I believe that if IT professionals are going to contribute to building a strong value-driven culture that works to achieve the business goals of the organization they are going to have to look at new approaches that may enhance the very work they are held accountable for.

Being responsible for business development for our Cincinnati IT consulting firm, over the past couple of weeks I have approached several clients and potential clients with some new value propositions.  Many do not want to talk about them, nor are some even curious on what they are.  Everyone has a full plate and little capacity for a new application development services, IT training or IT consulting project.

However, here is a question that I have for these individuals.  If it is true that information technology changes every fifteen to eighteen months, how can the IT systems and enterprise IT applications that you have had in place for the last three to five years continue to be relevant or simply as efficient as they could be?  Do you not owe it to yourself to at least listen to what an IT consulting firm here in Cincinnati has to offer?  Perhaps that IT consultant has significant experience with a solution that can make a difference but you are unaware of it because you are resistant to change and everything is running 'smoothly'.  I can understand your hesitation but what if the new solution could greatly improve your IT infrastructure, decrease costs, fuel improved productivity or more effectively balance your IT staffing needs?   Wouldn’t it behoove you to at least listen?
 

Just about every aspect of the world today is in transition and the IT services industry is no exception to this statement.  Professional IT services personnel must come to terms with the fact that the skills that they have developed in the past are valuable but they are not enough to sustain long-term growth in the IT field of today.

Technology touches every aspect of our lives and large enterprise organizations are dependent on technology to even operate.  The face of information technology consulting services has changed as well because being technical is not enough to meet the required skill sets of organizations.

Gartner has reported that the IT skills from yesterday are not enough to sustain an IT professional today.  The needs of business have changed and the IT professional of today needs to understand business and the business goals of their organization.  Everything and everyone needs to not only understand the big picture, they need to know how to flourish in it.

Gone are the days where IT departments were an island unto themselves.  The enterprise of today is an integrated machine that touches every part of the organization.  If an IT manager proposes a certain type of technology they must also be able to come up with the business case for their proposal.  Organizations need to understand and justify IT projects and not do them simply because the IT department suggests them.

This approach to business justification and accountability has also crossed over into the information technology staffing industry as well.  It is a fact that organizations will continue to need outside technical help but this technical help will have to be business savvy as well - there are no more shortcuts.  Just being technical is not enough anymore; an IT staffing person must appreciate the fact that they are placed in a position to do a job, but they must also understand the pressure that organization is dealing with when it comes to ensuring that information technology meets the needs of the company.  Firms are seeking staffers that can operate and function on both sides of the line, business and technology.

If one commits to this exciting world of information technology consulting services they must also commit to a pledge of life-long learning.  To not do so will not meet the needs of today’s business world and will place that person on the outside looking in and wondering why they did not get the position they sought.
 

It’s Friday, so why don’t we take a break form IT Strategy, IT consulting and IT staffing talk.  Last week I had the opportunity to attend the annual Leadership Luncheon at Cincinnati Christian University.  I’m on the president’s advisory board at CCU and had it not been for that, I may not have known about this wonderful annual event.  Ben Utecht was one of the speakers.  Something that I didn’t know is that he is a terrific singer.  One of his aspirations is to be on American Idol.

If you are in a leadership position in Cincinnati, I strongly encourage you to attend this event next year.

 

I was talking with someone at lunch yesterday about the economy.  Our consensus was the news media is talking down the economy.   While things are not great, they are not as bad as the media portrays.   This is especially true in IT staffing.  The chart below shows that IT employment has come down slightly from the peek last year.  Employment levels are up significantly from just a few years ago. 


If you would like to read the full report click here.   By the way, the restaurant we were having lunch at was full as well.