This is a follow up article to yesterday's "There are no silver bullets...".

Just because there are no silver bullets doesn't mean you cannot shoot accurately.  What I mean is that there is no tool that will solve all of your problems, but there are tools that will solve some of your important problems.

As an IT manager, one of your most important functions is identifying problems faced by your group.  These problems come in all sorts of sizes and shapes.  Some of the dinkiest appearing of your problems cause the biggest headaches.  It's your job to ferret out the problems and issues and come up with possible solutions. 

I get a kick out of management's focus on productivity, and how to improve it.  Rightly or wrongly, productivity is seen as THE SYMPTOM which needs to be treated.  Through many machinations and econometric explanations, productivity works out to be (Amount of Work Done)/(How much it Costs) * 100%.  So managers work on maximizing the numerator and accountants work on minimizing the denominator.  (The stress caused by these tensions will be the source of another article.)

It's usually a good idea to find out what tensions are pulling at your group's productivity (assuming productivity is really the symptom that needs treating).  Management pulls very hard on your group, setting directions and occasionally setting delivery schedules.  Workers pull very hard, determining whether you can build the product and how long it will take.  I'm an advocate of talking to both groupls, because disconnects between the two groups generally result in either real loss in productivity or perceived loss of productivity.  The former is deadly to a department, the latter is like a cancer: it eats at moral because the perceptions are never brought into alignment.

There are a lot of important topics to be covered under "shooting accurately".  But I've found that opening up communication between groups and people is imperative to getting a handle on problems.

So the short moral to shooting accurately?  Make sure everyone's perceptions are in line with expecations and abilities.