Understand the Difference Between Backups and Archives

They are not the same, and confusing the two concepts could be expensive

Analyst Perspective

Backups and archives are not interchangeable, but they can complement each other.

Backups and archives are two very different operations that are quite often confused or misplaced. IT and business leaders are tasked with protecting corporate data from a variety of threats. They also must conform to industry, geographical, and legal compliance regulations. Backup solutions keep the data safe from destruction. If you have a backup, why do you also need an archive? Archive solutions hold data for a long period of time and can be searched. If you have an archive, why do you also need a backup solution? Backups and archives used to be the same. Remember when you would keep the DAT tape in the same room as the argon gas fire suppression system for seven years? Now that's just not feasible. Some situations require a creative approach or a combination of backups and archives.

Understand the difference between archives and backups and you will understand why the two solutions are necessary and beneficial to the business.

P.J. Ryan
Research Director, Infrastructure & Operations
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

Keep in mind that backups are for recovery while archives are for discovery. Backups and archives are often confused but understanding the differences can result in significant savings of time and money. Backing up and archiving may be considered IT tasks but recovery and discovery are capabilities the business wants and is willing to pay for.

Archive

Tips & Tricks – Archiving

• Archiving will move older data to an alternate location. This will free up storage space in the production environment.
• Archiving solutions index the data to allow for easier searchability. This will aid in common business searches as well as assist with any potential legal searches.
• Archiving allows companies to hold onto data for historical purposes as well as for specific retention periods in compliance with industry and regional regulations such as SOX, GDPR, FISMA, as well as others (msp360.com).

Backup

Tips & Tricks – Backups

• Production data should be backed up on a regular basis, ideally once a day or more frequently if possible.
• Backups are intended to restore data when it gets deleted, over-written, or otherwise compromised. Most restore requests are from the last 24 to 48 hours, so it may be advantageous to keep a backup readily available on disk for a quick restore when needed.
• Some vendors and industry subject matter experts advocate the use of a 3-2-1 rule when it comes to backups:
  • Keep three copies of your production data
  • In at least two separate locations (some advocate two different formats), and
  • One copy should be offsite (nakivo.com)

Cold Storage

• Cold storage refers to a storage option offered by some cloud vendors. In the context of the discussion between backups and archives, it can be an option for a dedicated backup solution for a specific period. Cost is low and the data is protected from destruction.
• If an app has been replaced and all data transferred to the replacement solution but for some reason the company wishes to hold onto the data, you want a backup, not an archive. Extract the data, convert it into MongoDB or a similar solution, and drop it into cheap cloud storage (cold storage) for less than $5 per TB/month.

Case Study

Understanding the difference between archives and backups could save you a lot of time and money

INDUSTRY: Manufacturing | SOURCE: Info-Tech Research

Understanding the difference between an archive and a backup was the first step in solving their challenge.

A leading manufacturing company found themselves in a position where they had to decide between archiving or doing nothing.

The company had completed several acquisitions and ended up with multiple legacy applications that had been merged or migrated into replacement solutions. These legacy applications were very important to the original companies and although the data they held had been migrated to a replacement solution, executives felt they should hold onto these applications for a period of time, just in case.

Some of the larger applications were archived using a modern archiving solution, but when it came to the smaller applications, the cost to add them to the archiving solution greatly exceeded the cost to just keep them running and maintain the associated infrastructure.

A research advisor from Info-Tech Research Group joined a call with the manufacturing company and discussed their situation. The difference between archives and backups was explained and through the course of the conversation it was discovered that the solution was a modified backup. The application data had already been preserved through the migration, so data could be accessed in the production environment. The requirement to keep the legacy application up and running was not necessary but in compliance with the request to keep the information, the data could be exported from the legacy application into a non-sequential database, compressed, and stored in cloud-based cold storage for less than five dollars per terabyte per month. The manufacturing company’s staff realized that they could apply this same approach to several of their legacy applications and save tens of thousands of dollars in the process.

Understand the Difference Between Backups and Archives

Info-Tech Insight

Archives and backups are not the same, and there is a use case for each. Sometimes minor adjustments may be required to make the use case work. Understanding the basics of backups and archives can lead to significant savings at a monetary and effort level.

Additional Guidance

Case Study

Using tape backups as an archive solution could result in an expensive discovery and retrieval exercise.

INDUSTRY: Healthcare | SOURCE: Zasio Enterprises Inc.

“Do not commingle archive data with backup or disaster recovery tapes.”

A court case in the United States District Court for the District of Nevada involving Guardiola and Renown Health in 2015 is a good example of why using a backup solution to solve an archiving challenge is a bad idea.

Renown Health used a retention policy that declared any email older than six months of age as inactive and moved that email to a backup tape. Renown Health was ordered by the court to produce emails from a period of time in the past. Renown estimated that it would cost at least $248,000 to produce those emails, based on the effort involved to restore data from each tape and search for the email in question. Renown Health argued that this long and expensive process would result in undue costs.

The court reviewed the situation and ruled against Renown Health and ordered them to comply with the request (Zasio.com).

A proper archiving solution would have provided a quick and low-cost method to retrieve the emails in question.

Backups and archives are complementary to each other

• Archives are still production data, but the data does not change. A backup is recommended for the archived data, but the frequency of the backups can be lowered.
• Backups protect you if a disaster strikes by providing a copy of the production data that was compromised or damaged. Archives allow you to access older data that may have just been forgotten, not destroyed or compromised. Archives could also protect you in a legal court case by providing data that is older but may prove your argument in court.

Archives and backups are not the same.

Backups copy your data. Archives move your data. Backups facilitate recovery. Archives facilitate discovery.

Is it a backup or archive?

• You want to preserve older data for legal and compliance reasons, so you put extra effort into keeping your tape backups safe and secure for seven years. That’s a big mistake that may cost you time and money. You want an archive solution.
• You replace your older application and migrate all data to the new system, but you want to hold onto the old data, just in case. That’s a backup, not an archive.
• A long serving senior executive recently left the company. You want to preserve the contents of the executive's laptop in case it is needed in the future. That’s a backup.

Considerations When Choosing Between Solutions

Related Info-Tech Research

	Establish an Effective Data Protection Plan Give data the attention it deserves by building a strategy that goes beyond backup.
	Modernize Enterprise Storage Current and emerging storage technologies are disrupting the status quo – prepare your infrastructure for the exponential rise in data and its storage requirements.
	Data Archiving Policy

Bibliography

“Backup vs. archiving: Know the difference.” Open-E. Accessed 05 Mar 2022.Web.

G, Denis. “How to build retention policy.” MSP360, Jan 3, 2020. Accessed 10 Mar 2022.

Ipsen, Adam. “Archive vs Backup: What’s the Difference? A Definition Guide.” BackupAssist, 28 Mar 2017. Accessed 04 Mar 2022.

Kang, Soo. “Mitigating the expense of E-discovery; Recognizing the difference between back-ups and archived data.” Zasio Enterprises, 08 Oct 2015. Accessed 3 Mar 2022.

Mayer, Alex. “The 3-2-1 Backup Rule – An Efficient Data Protection Strategy.” Naviko. Accessed 12 Mar 2022.

“What is Data-Archiving?” Proofpoint. Accessed 07 Mar 2022.

Select and Prioritize Digital Initiatives

Build your digital investment business case.

Info-Tech Research Group

Key Concepts

Digital initiative

A project – or a group of interdependent projects – whose primary purpose is to enable digital technologies and/or digital business models. These technologies and models may be net new to the organization, or they may be existing ones that are optimized and improved by the initiative itself.

The feasibility of any initiative is gauged by answering:

• What amount of return on investment (ROI) or value does it bring to the organization?
• What level of complexity does it pose to project execution?
• To what extent does it solve a problem or leverage an opportunity?
• To what degree is it aligned with digital business goals?

Digital strategy

The plan to deploy existing/emerging technologies to look at developing new products and services, new business models, and operational efficiency to meet or exceed performance targets.

IT strategy

The plan for deploying and maintaining applications, hardware, infrastructure, and IT services that support the business goals in a secure/regulatory-compliant manner to ensure reliability.

Digital transformation

Digital transformation is an at-scale change program – planned and executed over a finite time period – with the aspiration of creating material and sustainable improvement in the performance of an organization. Techniques include deploying a programmatic approach to innovation along with enabling technologies, capabilities, and practices that drive efficiency and create new products, markets, and business models.

Info-Tech Insight

The business has embarked on its digital transformation journey. As CIO, you are being relied on to help triage what is most important – initiatives that will move the needle to achieve and fulfill the digital goals and ambitions of the organization.

Analyst Perspective

Prioritization follows ideation, and it’s not always easy.

Your stakeholders have spent considerable time and effort identifying and articulating a digital business strategy. Now that ideas have turned into opportunities, the CIO must prioritize those opportunities as actual initiatives. Where to begin?

Your first task is to identify the criteria that will be used to conduct prioritization activities. These criteria should be immutable and rigorously applied.

Your second task will be to develop business cases for each opportunity that passes muster. But don’t worry, you won’t need an MBA to get the job done properly.

Ross Armstrong

Principal Research Director
Info-Tech Research Group

Info-Tech’s digital transformation journey

By now, you have established your current strategic context

You have reviewed trends to reimagine the future of your industry and undertaken a digital maturity assessment to validate your business objectives and innovation goals. Now you need to evolve the current scope of your digital vision and opportunities.

• Phase 1.1: Industry Trends Report

• Phase 1.2: Digital Maturity Assessment

• Phase 2.1: Zero In on Business Objectives

By this point you have leveraged industry roundtables to better understand the art of the possible – exploring global trends, shifts in market forces or industry, customer needs, emerging technologies, and economic forecasts and creating opportunities out of these disruptions.

In Phase 2.1, you identified your business and innovation goals and documented your current capabilities, prioritized for transformation.

Business and innovation goals have been established through stakeholder interviews and business document review.

Current capabilities have been prioritized for transformation and heat mapped.

You have also formalized your digital strategy

Throughout the course of Phase 2.2, you identified new digital opportunities, identified the business capabilities required to capitalize those opportunities, and updated the digital goals of your organization, accordingly.

The end result of this exercise is a new goals cascade that aligns digital goals and capabilities with those of the business. Digital initiatives were also identified but not yet selected or prioritized for execution at the project level.

Now you will select and prioritize digital initiatives

The goal of this phase is to ensure that initiatives that are green-lit for execution have been successfully assessed against your chosen criteria and that the business case for each initiative is firmly established and documented.

There are three key activities outlined here that describe the actions that can be undertaken by industry members to help select and prioritize digital initiatives for the business.

1. Identify your selection criteria

2. Evaluate initiatives against criteria

3. Determine a prioritized list of initiatives

Info-Tech’s approach

Step 1: Identify Your Selection Criteria

Understand which conditions must be met in order to turn an opportunity into a digital initiative.

Step 1

Identify Your Selection Criteria

Use these selection criteria to prioritize initiatives

Ideas matter, but not all ideas are created equal. Now that you have elicited ideas and identified opportunities, discuss the assumptions, risks, and benefits associated with each proposed digital business initiative.

Prioritize opportunities into initiatives

Recall that the opportunities identified in Phase 2.2 also became proposed digital initiatives demonstrated in your goals cascade.

In your discussion, evaluate each opportunity through a matrix to create tension between value and complexity or other dimensions. Capture the information based on measurable business benefits-realization; risks or considerations; assumptions; and competencies, talent, and assets needed to deliver.

Leverage opportunity profiles from your digital strategy

To start, take one of the opportunity profiles you created in Phase 2.2, Build Your Digital Vision and Strategy, and use it throughout the following steps. Once done, repeat with the next opportunity profile until all have been vetted against criteria. If you did not use Info-Tech’s approach, simply use whatever list of digital business opportunities provided to you from stakeholders.

Prioritization Criteria

Run each initiative through the following evaluation criteria. When finished, any opportunities that appear in the top left quadrant (high value/low complexity) are now your highest priority digital initiatives.

Instructions:

Assign each initiative a letter. As you decide on each one, move a copy of the circled letter to its appropriate place on the 2x2 selection matrix.

Info-Tech Insight

Evaluation should be based on the insights from analysis across all criteria. Leverage group discussion to help contextualize and challenge assumptions when validating opportunities.

Digital initiative ≠ IT project

Every idea is a good one, unless you need one that works. What “works” as a digital initiative is not the same thing as a straightforward IT project that would be typically managed by a project manager or PMO. These latter projects will be addressed in Phase 3.1 of the digital journey.

Opportunities and business needs > Business model > Impact > Mandatory > Innovation path forward

Digital Track

Focus: Transform the business and operations

1. Problem may not be well defined.
2. “Initiative” is not clear.
3. Based on market research, customer needs, trend analysis, and economic forecast, risk to the business if fit-for-purpose initiative is not identified.
4. Previous delivery results not as expected, or uncertain how to continue the project.
5. Highly complex with significant impact to transform the business or operations.
6. Execution approach is not clear.
7. Capabilities may not exist within IT.

IT PMO

1. Emerging technology trends create opportunities to modernize IT, not transform business.
2. Problem is well defined and understood.
3. Initiative is clearly identified.
4. New IT project.
5. Can be complex but does not transform the business.
6. Standard PMP approach is a good fit.
7. Capabilities exist to execute within IT.
8. Software vendor or systems integrator is initiative provider.

Step 2: Evaluate Initiatives Against Criteria

Ruthlessly prioritize which opportunities will deliver the greatest business value and pose the best chance of success.

Step 2

Evaluate Initiatives Against Criteria

Exemplar: Prioritization criteria

Your prioritization matrix should look something like this. Initiatives B and C will now have short-form business cases developed for them. Initiatives in the “Should Plan” quadrant can be dealt with later.

Draw information from the opportunity profiles

You created opportunity profiles in Phase 2.2 to clarify, validate and evaluate specific ideas for digital initiatives. In these profiles, you considered the timing, relevance, and impact of those opportunities.

Some prioritized initiatives will have an immediate and significant impact on your business. Some may have a significant impact, but on a longer timeline. Understanding this is important context for your overall digital business strategy.

Above all, you must be able to communicate to stakeholders how the newly prioritized digital initiatives are relevant to driving the strategic growth of the business.

Start by elucidating further on initiative benefits and business value as outlined in the opportunity profile. This will become crucial for completing your next step – building a short-form business case for each prioritized initiative.

Short-Form Business Case Template

Prepare your business case for each initiative

Tasks:

1. On a whiteboard, draw the visual initiative canvas supplied below.
2. For each prioritized initiative, leverage its opportunity profile (if used) to list the resulting customer or stakeholder products/services and its pain relievers and gain creators in the associated sections of the canvas.
3. Ensure that the top pains, gains, and jobs are addressed by products/services, pain relievers, and gain creators.
4. Use this information as a basis for further exercises in this section, such as defining benefits, articulating value proposition and vision, and cost estimates.

Expand on the key benefits of each initiative

Business cases are not just a vehicle with which to acquire resources for investments, they are a mechanism that helps ensure the benefits of an investment are realized. To accomplish this, a business case must have a set of clearly defined benefits, combined with an understanding of how they will be measured and an explicitly stated beneficiary who can corroborate that the benefit has been realized.

What is a benefit?

Benefits are the advantages, or outcomes, that specific groups or individuals realize as a result of the proposed initiative’s implementation.

Initiative inputs

Initiative inputs are the time, resources, and scope dedicated to the endeavor of implementing an initiative.

Identify how to measure benefit achievement

Benefits are realized when an organization either starts doing something new, stops doing something, or improves the way something is already being done. The impact of these changes must be measured in order to determine whether the change is positive and if the case warrants more resources in order to scale.

Types of benefits

• Observable: These are measured by opinion or judgement.
• Measurable: These can be identified when there is an existing measure in place for the benefit (or when one can be easily created).
• Quantifiable: Similar to measurable benefits; however, these benefits additionally feature size or magnitude (if it can be reliably estimated).
• Financial: These are benefits that can be communicated in monetary terms. A benefit should only be classified as financial when sufficient evidence is available to show that the stated value is likely to be achieved.

Benefit owners and responsibilities

1. Each benefit should have assigned to it an explicit owner who gains an advantage as a result of the initiative’s implementation.
2. For most benefits, the owner will be the primary beneficiary of the initiative.
3. These individuals are the ones who must corroborate that a benefit has been realized.
4. Assigning an owner to each benefit will foster a sense of accountability in terms of benefits realization and will also create a traceable path that helps track the success of the initiative.

Complete the benefits section of the business case

Tasks:

1. Use the Short-Form Business Case Template included in this deck.
2. Arrange a meeting with the key beneficiary or beneficiaries of your initiative. Refer back to the benefits and outcomes section of the initiative’s opportunity profile (if used) as a starting point.
3. Clearly define what the key benefits of your initiative will be and list them in the Short-Form Business Case Template.
4. Assign an owner to each benefit – the individual who will corroborate that the benefit has accrued.
5. Come to a mutual agreement with the beneficiaries as to whether each benefit is:
   • Financial
   • Quantifiable
   • Measurable
   • Observable
6. Discuss and list the methods that will be used to measure each benefit and list them in the Short-Form Business Case Template.

Craft value proposition and vision statements

The way one articulates the value an initiative provides is just as important as the initiative itself. Use the previous exercises as inputs to craft a statement that reflects the value your initiative will provide, but also describes how the initiative will create value. Specifically, a value proposition should answer the following questions:

1. Who is the initiative for?
2. What is the initiative?
3. What does the initiative do?
4. How is the initiative different from others?

Complete value prop and vision statement sections of the business case

Tasks:

1. Having already completed the benefits section of the Short-Form Business Case Template, turn your attention to the value proposition section.
2. Using your problem and initiative canvases, in addition to the benefits section, craft a value proposition statement that answers the following questions in one or two sentences:
   • Who is the initiative for?
   • What is the initiative?
   • What does the initiative do?
   • How is the initiative different?
3. Input the value proposition statement into the value proposition section of the Short-Form Business Case Template.

Identify initiative steps and add to business case

Tasks:

Turn your attention to the roadmap section of the Short-Form Business Case Template and fill it in through the following steps:

1. Select which scope, resource, and/or time reduction tactics to apply given the context of the project.
2. Use the test, run, gauge, and collect framework supplied, unless you elect to generate your own project phases. If that is the case, ensure that phases are mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive (MECE).
3. For each phase, supply a brief description of the activities to be undertaken for that phase.
4. Map the benefits to be accrued within each phase.
5. For each phase, supply a set of two to three potential factors that create risk toward the benefits listed.
6. For each risk, supply a mitigation tactic that could be employed to diffuse the risk or to mitigate it completely.

Fill out the cost section of the business case

Tasks:

1. Having already completed the roadmap part of the Short-Form Business Case Template, turn your attention to the cost section.
2. Use the scope, resource, and time reduction tactics and roadmap to estimate the cost necessary to execute the project. Remember that costs are a factor of the resources required and the cost type.
   • Resources:
     • Hardware
     • Software
     • Human
     • Network and communications
     • Facilities
   • Cost Types:
     • Acquisition
     • Operation
     • Growth and change
3. Complete the cost section of the Short-Form Business Case Template with the cost estimate for the project.

Exemplar: Short-Form Business Case

Step 3: Determine a Prioritized List of Initiatives

Green-light opportunities for digital investment and create your list of high-priority digital initiatives.

Step 3

Determine a Prioritized List of Initiatives

Compile your prioritized initiatives

There are two follow-up actions to do with your newly prioritized list of digital initiative business cases: present them to stakeholders for approval and then add them to your IT strategic roadmap.

Present business cases to stakeholders

For most high-profile digital business initiatives, the short-form business case will not be the first time stakeholders hear about them. By this point, securing approval should only be a formality if the initiative has been effectively socialized beforehand. If this is not the case, one must build an adequate understanding of the stakeholder landscape and then use this understanding to effectively present business cases for digital initiative and receive approval to proceed with them.

Gauge the importance of various stakeholders and tailor your message according to their concerns and the requirements of their role. Consider the following important questions about each stakeholder:

• Authority: How much influence does the stakeholder have? Enough to drive the initiative forward?
• Involvement: How interested is the stakeholder? How involved is the stakeholder in the initiative already?
• Impact: To what degree will the stakeholder be impacted? Will this significantly change how they do their job?
• Support: Is the stakeholder a supporter of the initiative? Neutral? A resistor?

Develop a stakeholder map

A stakeholder map helps visualize the importance of various stakeholders and their concerns so you can prioritize your time according to those stakeholders who are most impacted by a digital initiative, as well as those who have the authority to green-light them.

1. Evaluate each stakeholder in terms of authority, involvement, impact, and support, as discussed in the previous slide.
2. Map each stakeholder to an area on the right template (slide four) based upon the level of their authority and involvement (high or low).
   • Vary the size of the circle to distinguish stakeholders that are highly impacted by the IT strategy from those who are not. Color each circle to show each stakeholder’s estimated or gauged level of support for the project.
3. Ask yourself if the stakeholder map looks accurate. Is there someone who has no involvement in digital initiatives, but should?
   • A) For example, if a CFO who has the authority to disapprove project funding is heavily impacted and not involved, the success of the business cases will be put at risk.
4. Draw a dotted circle to show where that stakeholder needs to be located (increased involvement and support), and an arrow with a dotted line to signify the needed change. Some stakeholders may have influence over others.
   • B) For example, a COO who highly values the opinion of the director of operations would be influenced by that director. Draw an arrow from one stakeholder to another to signify this relationship.

Focus on key players: Relevant stakeholders who have high power are highly impacted and should have high involvement. Engage the stakeholders that are impacted most and have the authority to influence digital initiatives and approve business cases.

Summary of key insights

By now, you should have a firm understanding of the principles and desired actions, behaviors, and outcomes that have been presented in this methodology. Furthermore:

1. Prioritization of digital opportunities can be a relatively straightforward task as long as the correct stakeholders are involved and use a common and agreed upon set of criteria.
2. Developing a business case for a digital initiative in an agile manner need not be a grueling exercise provided that a vetted and repeatable process is used.
3. Above all, remember that this is a journey. Going from an intangible (macro-trend, problem, or opportunity) to a tangible (actual project or initiative) does not happen all at once.

Related Info-Tech Research

Understand Industry Trends

Assess how the external environment presents opportunities or threats to your organization.

Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy

Align with the business by creating an IT strategy that documents the business context, key initiatives, and a strategic roadmap.

Define Your Digital Business Strategy

Design a strategy that applies innovation to your business model, streamlines and transforms processes, and makes use of technologies to enhance interactions with customers and employees.

Research Contributors and Experts

Ross Armstrong

Principal Research Director, CIO Advisory
Info-Tech Research Group

Ross Armstrong is a Principal Research Director in the CIO Advisory practice at Info-Tech Research Group, covering the areas of IT strategic planning, digital strategy, digital transformation, and IT innovation.

Ross has worked in a variety of public and private sector industries including automotive, IT, mobile/telecom, and higher education. All of his roles over the years have centered around data-driven market research – in pursuit of insightful and successful product development and product management – at their core.

In addition to his long tenure as an Info-Tech Research Group analyst, Ross has worked in research and product innovation positions at Autodata initiatives (J.D. Power), BlackBerry, and Ivey Business School (Western University).

Ross holds a Master of Arts degree in English Language and Literature from Western University (UWO) and has served as an advisory board member for a number of not-for-profit and educational institutions.

Joanne Lee

Principal Research Director, CIO Advisory
Info-Tech Research Group

Joanne is an executive with over 25 years of experience providing leadership in digital technology and management consulting across both public and private entities from initiative delivery to organizational redesign across BC, Ontario, and Globally.

A Director within KPMG’s CIO Advisory Management Consulting services and practice lead for Digital Health in BC, Joanne has led various client engagements from ERP Cloud Strategy, IT Operating Models, Data and Analytics maturity, to process redesign. More recently, Joanne was the Chief Program Officer and Executive Director responsible for leading the implementation of a $450M technology and business transformation initiative across 13 hospitals and community services for one of the largest health authorities in BC.

A former clinician, Joanne has held progressive leadership roles in healthcare with accountabilities across IT operations and service management, data analytics, project management office (PMO), clinical informatics, and privacy and contract management. Joanne is passionate about connecting people, concepts, and capital.

Bibliography

“AI: From Data to ROI.” Cognizant, September 2020. Accessed November 2022.

Bughin, Jacques, et al. “The Case for Digital Reinvention.” McKinsey Quarterly, February 2017. Accessed November 2022.

“The Business Case for Digital Transformation.” CPA Canada, June 2021. Accessed November 2022.

“The Case for Digital Transformation.” The National Center for the Middle Market, Ohio State University, 2020. Accessed October 2022.

“Digital Transformation in Government Case Study.” Ionology, April 2020. Accessed October 2022.

Louis, Peter, et al. “Internet of Things – From Buzzword to Business Case.” Siemens, 11 January 2021. Accessed December 2022.

Miesen, Nick. “Case Studies of Digital Transformations in Process and Aerospace Industries.” Jugaad, 2018. Accessed November 2022.

Proff, Harald, and Claudia Bittrich. “The Digital Business Case - Done Right!” Deloitte, August 2019. Accessed October 2022.

“Propelling an Aerospace Innovator.” Accenture, 2021. Accessed October 2022.

Schmidt-Subramanian, Maxie. “The ROI of CX Transformation.” Forrester, 15 August 2019. Accessed November 2022.

Ward, John, et al. “Building Better Business Cases for IT Investments.” California Management Review, Sept. 2007. Web.

Develop an Availability and Capacity Management Plan

Manage capacity to increase uptime and reduce costs.

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

The cloud changes the capacity manager’s job, but it doesn’t eliminate it.

"Nobody doubts the cloud’s transformative power. But will its ascent render “capacity manager” an archaic term to be carved into the walls of datacenters everywhere for future archaeologists to puzzle over? No. While it is true that the cloud has fundamentally changed how capacity managers do their jobs , the process is more important than ever. Managing capacity – and, by extent, availability – means minimizing costs while maximizing uptime. The cloud era is the era of unlimited capacity – and of infinite potential costs. If you put the infinity symbol on a purchase order… well, it’s probably not a good idea. Manage demand. Manage your capacity. Manage your availability. And, most importantly, keep your stakeholders happy. You won’t regret it."

Jeremy Roberts,

Consulting Analyst, Infrastructure Practice

Info-Tech Research Group

Availability and capacity management transcend IT

This Research Is Designed For:

✓ CIOs who want to increase uptime and reduce costs

✓ Infrastructure managers who want to deliver increased value to the business

✓ Enterprise architects who want to ensure stability of core IT services

✓ Dedicated capacity managers

This Research Will Help You:

✓ Develop a list of core services

✓ Establish visibility into your system

✓ Solicit business needs

✓ Project future demand

✓ Set SLAs

✓ Increase uptime

✓ Optimize spend

This Research Will Also Assist:

✓ Project managers

✓ Service desk staff

This Research Will Help Them:

✓ Plan IT projects

✓ Better manage availability incidents caused by lack of capacity

Executive summary

Situation

• IT infrastructure leaders are responsible for ensuring that the business has access to the technology needed to keep the organization humming along. This requires managing capacity and availability.
• Dependencies go undocumented. Services are provided on an ad hoc basis, and capacity/availability are managed reactively.

Complication

• Organizations are overprovisioning an average of 59% for compute, and 48% for storage. This is expensive. With budget pressure mounting, the cost of this approach can’t be ignored.
• Lead time to respond to demand is long. Half of organizations have experienced capacity-related downtime, and almost 60% wait 3+ months for additional capacity. (451 Research, 3)

Resolution

• Conduct a business impact analysis to determine which of your services are most critical, and require active capacity management that will reap more in benefits than it produces in costs.
• Establish visibility into your system. You can’t track what you can’t see, and you can’t see when you don’t have proper monitoring tools in place.
• Develop an understanding of business needs. Use a combination of historical trend analyses and consultation with line of business and project managers to separate wants from needs. Overprovisioning used to be necessary, but is no longer required.
• Project future needs in line with your hardware lifecycle. Never suffer availability issues as a result of a lack of capacity again.

Info-Tech Insight

1. Components are critical. The business doesn’t care about components. You, however, are not so lucky…
2. Ask what the business is working on, not what they need. If you ask them what they need, they’ll tell you – and it won’t be cheap. Find out what they’re going to do, and use your expertise to service those needs.
3. Cloud shmoud. The role of the capacity manager is changing with the cloud, but capacity management is as important as ever.

Save money and drive efficiency with an effective availability and capacity management plan

Overprovisioning happens because of the old style of infrastructure provisioning (hardware refresh cycles) and because capacity managers don’t know how much they need (either as a result of inaccurate or nonexistent information).

According to 451 Research, 59% of enterprises have had to wait 3+ months for new capacity. It is little wonder, then, that so many opt to overprovision. Capacity management is about ensuring that IT services are available, and with lead times like that, overprovisioning can be more attractive than the alternative. Fortunately there is hope. An effective availability and capacity management plan can help you:

• Identify your gold systems
• Establish visibility into them
• Project your future capacity needs

Balancing overprovisioning and spending is the capacity manager’s struggle.

Availability and capacity management go together like boots and feet

Availability and capacity are not the same, but they are related and can be effectively managed together as part of a single process.

If an IT department is unable to meet demand due to insufficient capacity, users will experience downtime or a degradation in service. To be clear, capacity is not the only factor in availability – reliability, serviceability, etc. are significant as well. But no organization can effectively manage availability without paying sufficient attention to capacity.

"Availability Management is concerned with the design, implementation, measurement and management of IT services to ensure that the stated business requirements for availability are consistently met."

– OGC, Best Practice for Service Delivery, 12

"Capacity management aims to balance supply and demand [of IT storage and computing services] cost-effectively…"

– OGC, Business Perspective, 90

Integrate the three levels of capacity management

Successful capacity management involves a holistic approach that incorporates all three levels.

The C-suite cares about business capacity as part of the organization’s strategic planning. Service leads care about their assigned services. IT infrastructure is concerned with components, but not for their own sake. Components mean services that are ultimately designed to facilitate business.

A healthcare organization practiced poor capacity management and suffered availability issues as a result

CASE STUDY

Industry: Healthcare

Source: Interview

New functionalities require new infrastructure

There was a project to implement an elastic search feature. This had to correlate all the organization’s member data from an Oracle data source and their own data warehouse, and pool them all into an elastic search index so that it could be used by the provider portal search function. In estimating the amount of space needed, the infrastructure team assumed that all the data would be shared in a single place. They didn’t account for the architecture of elastic search in which indexes are shared across multiple nodes and shards are often split up separately.

Beware underestimating demand and hardware sourcing lead times

As a result, they vastly underestimated the amount of space that was needed and ended up short by a terabyte. The infrastructure team frantically sourced more hardware, but the rush hardware order arrived physically damaged and had to be returned to the vendor.

Sufficient budget won’t ensure success without capacity planning

The project’s budget had been more than sufficient to pay for the extra necessary capacity, but because a lack of understanding of the infrastructure impact resulted in improper forecasting, the project ended up stuck in a standstill.

Manage availability and keep your stakeholders happy

If you run out of capacity, you will inevitably encounter availability issues like downtime and performance degradation . End users do not like downtime, and neither do their managers.

There are three variables that are monitored, measured, and analyzed as part of availability management more generally (Valentic).

1. Uptime:

The availability of a system is the percentage of time the system is “up,” (and not degraded) which can be calculated using the following formula: uptime/(uptime + downtime) x 100%. The more components there are in a system, the lower the availability, as a rule.

1. Reliability:

The length of time a component/service can go before there is an outage that brings it down, typically measured in hours.

1. Maintainability:

The amount of time it takes for a component/service to be restored in the event of an outage, also typically measured in hours.

Enter the cloud: changes in the capacity manager role

There can be no doubt – the rise of the public cloud has fundamentally changed the nature of capacity management.

Vendors will sell you the cloud as a solution to your capacity/availability problems

Traditionally, increases in capacity have come in bursts as a reaction to availability issues. This model inevitably results in overprovisioning, driving up costs. Access to the cloud changes the equation. On-demand capacity means that, ideally, nobody should pay for unused capacity.

Reality check: even in the cloud era, capacity management is necessary

You will likely find vendors to nurture the growth of a gap between your expectations and reality. That can be damaging.

The cloud reality does not look like the cloud ideal. Even with the ostensibly elastic cloud, vendors like the consistency that longer-term contracts offer. Enter reserved instances: in exchange for lower hourly rates, vendors offer the option to pay a fee for a reserved instance. Usage beyond the reserved will be billed at a higher hourly rate. In order to determine where that line should be drawn, you should engage in detailed capacity planning. Unfortunately, even when done right, this process will result in some overprovisioning, though it does provide convenience from an accounting perspective. The key is to use spot instances where demand is exceptional and bounded. Example: A university registration server that experiences exceptional demand at the start of term but at no other time.

Use best practices to optimize your cloud resources

Even in the era of elasticity, capacity planning is crucial. Spot instances – the spikes in the graph above – are more expensive, but if your capacity needs vary substantially, reserving instances for all of the space you need can cost even more money. Efficiently planning capacity will help you draw this line.

Evaluate business impact; not all systems are created equal

Limited resources are a reality. Detailed visibility into every single system is often not feasible and could be too much information.

Simple and effective. Sometimes a simple display can convey all of the information necessary to manage critical systems. In cars it is important to know your speed, how much fuel is in the tank, and whether or not you need to change your oil/check your engine.

Where to begin?! Specialized information is sometimes necessary, but it can be difficult to navigate.

Take advantage of a business impact analysis to define and understand your critical services

Ideally, downtime would be minimal. In reality, though, downtime is a part of IT life. It is important to have realistic expectations about its nature and likelihood.

Info-Tech Insight

According to end users, every system is critical and downtime is intolerable. Of course, once they see how much totally eliminating downtime can cost, they might change their tune. It is important to have this discussion to separate the critical from the less critical – but still important – services.

Establish visibility into critical systems

You may have seen “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” or a variation thereof floating around the internet. This adage is consumable and makes sense…doesn’t it?

"It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth."

– W. Edwards Deming, statistician and management consultant, author of The New Economics

While it is true that total monitoring is not absolutely necessary for management, when it comes to availability and capacity – objectively quantifiable service characteristics – a monitoring strategy is unavoidable. Capturing fluctuations in demand, and adjusting for those fluctuations, is among the most important functions of a capacity manager, even if hovering over employees with a stopwatch is poor management.

Solicit needs from line of business managers

Unless you head the world’s most involved IT department (kudos if you do) you’re going to have to determine your needs from the business.

Demand: manage or be managed

You might think you can get away with uncritically accepting your users’ demands, but this is not best practice. If you provide it, they will use it.

The company meeting

“I don’t need this much RAM,” the application developer said, implausibly. Titters wafted above the assembled crowd as her IT colleagues muttered their surprise. Heads shook, eyes widened. In fact, as she sat pondering her utterance, the developer wasn’t so sure she believed it herself. Noticing her consternation, the infrastructure manager cut in and offered the RAM anyway, forestalling the inevitable crisis that occurs when seismic internal shifts rock fragile self-conceptions. Until next time, he thought.

"Work expands as to fill the resources available for its completion…"

– C. Northcote Parkinson, quoted in Klimek et al.

Combine historical data with the needs you’ve solicited to holistically project your future needs

Predicting the future is difficult, but when it comes to capacity management, foresight is necessary.

Critical inputs

In order to project your future needs, the following inputs are necessary.

1. Usage trends: While it is true that past performance is no indication of future demand, trends are still a good way to validate requests from the business.
2. Line of business requests: An understanding of the projects the business has in the pipes is important for projecting future demand.
3. Institutional knowledge: Read between the lines. As experts on information technology, the IT department is well-equipped to translate needs into requirements.

Follow best practice guidelines to maximize the efficiency of your availability and capacity management process

Understand how the key frameworks relate and interact

BA104: Manage availability and capacity

• Current state assessment
• Forecasting based on business requirements
• Risk assessment of planning and implementation of requirements

Availability management

• Determine business requirements
• Match requirements to capabilities
• Address any mismatch between requirements and capabilities in a cost-effective manner

Capacity management

• Monitoring services and components
• Tuning for efficiency
• Forecasting future requirements
• Influencing demand
• Producing a capacity plan

Availability and capacity management

• Conduct a business impact analysis
• Establish visibility into critical systems
• Solicit and incorporate business needs
• Identify and mitigate risks

Disaster recovery and business continuity planning are forms of availability management

The scope of this project is managing day-to-day availability, largely but not exclusively, in the context of capacity. For additional important information on availability, see the following Info-Tech projects.

• Develop a Business Continuity Plan

If your focus is on ensuring process continuity in the event of a disaster.

• Establish a Program to Enable Effective Performance Monitoring

If your focus is on flow mapping and transaction monitoring as part of a plan to engage APM vendors.

• Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan

If your focus is on hardening your IT systems against major events.

Info-Tech’s approach to availability and capacity management is stakeholder-centered and cloud ready

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Availability & capacity management – project overview

Workshop overview

Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

PHASE 1

Conduct a Business Impact Analysis

Step 1.1: Conduct a business impact analysis

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Record applications and dependencies in the Business Impact Analysis Tool.
• Define a scale to estimate the impact of various applications’ downtime.
• Estimate the impact of applications’ downtime.

This involves the following participants:

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure team

Outcomes of this step

• Estimated impact of downtime for various applications

Execute a business impact analysis (BIA) as part of a broader availability plan

1.1a Business Impact Analysis Tool

Business impact analyses are an invaluable part of a broader IT strategy. Conducting a BIA benefits a variety of processes, including disaster recovery, business continuity, and availability and capacity management

Info-Tech Insight

Engaging in detailed capacity planning for an insignificant service draws time and resources away from more critical capacity planning exercises. Time spent tracking and planning use of the ancient fax machine in the basement is time you’ll never get back.

Control the scope of your availability and capacity management planning project with a business impact analysis

Don’t avoid conducting a BIA because of a perception that it’s too onerous or not necessary. If properly managed, as described in this blueprint, the BIA does not need to be onerous and the benefits are tangible.

A BIA enables you to identify appropriate spend levels, continue to drive executive support, and prioritize disaster recovery planning for a more successful outcome. For example, an Info-Tech survey found that a BIA has a significant impact on setting appropriate recovery time objectives (RTOs) and appropriate spending.

Terms

No BIA: lack of a BIA, or a BIA bases solely on the perceived importance of IT services.

BIA: based on a detailed evaluation or estimated dollar impact of downtime.

Source: Info-Tech Research Group; N=70

Select the services you wish to evaluate with the Business Impact Analysis Tool

1.1b 1 hour

In large organizations especially, collating an exhaustive list of applications and services is going to be onerous. For the purposes of this project, a subset should suffice.

Instructions

1. Gather a diverse group of IT staff and end users in a room with a whiteboard.
2. Solicit feedback from the group. Questions to ask:

• What services do you regularly use? What do you see others using? (End users)
• Which service inspires the greatest number of service calls? (IT)
• What services are you most excited about? (Management)
• What services are the most critical for business operations? (Everybody)

Input

• Applications/services

Output

• Candidate applications for the business impact analysis

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Infrastructure manager
• Enterprise architect
• Application owners
• End users

Info-Tech Insight

Include a variety of services in your analysis. While it might be tempting to jump ahead and preselect important applications, don’t. The process is inherently valuable, and besides, it might surprise you.

Record the applications and dependencies in the BIA tool

1.1c Use tab 1 of the Business Impact Analysis Tool

1. In the Application/System column, list the applications identified for this pilot as well as the Core Infrastructure category. Also indicate the Impact on the Business and Business Owner.
2. List the dependencies for each application in the appropriate columns:

• Hosted On-Premises (In-House) – If the physical equipment is in a facility you own, record it here, even if it is managed by a vendor.
• Hosted by a Co-Lo/MSP – List any dependencies hosted by a co-lo/MSP vendor.
• Cloud (includes "as a Service”) – List any dependencies hosted by a cloud vendor.

Note: If there are no dependencies for a particular category, leave it blank.

Example

ID is optional. It is a sequential number by default.

In-House, Co-Lo/MSP, and Cloud dependencies; leave blank if not applicable.

Add notes as applicable – e.g. critical support services.

Define a scoring scale to estimate different levels of impact

1.1d Use tab 2 of the Business Impact Analysis Tool

Modify the Business Impact Scales headings and Overall Criticality Rating terminology to suit your organization. For example, if you don’t have business partners, use that column to measure a different goodwill impact or just ignore that column in this tool (i.e. leave it blank). Estimate the different levels of potential impact (where four is the highest impact and zero is no impact) and record these in the Business Impact Scales columns.

Estimate the impact of downtime for each application

1.1e Use tab 3 of the Business Impact Analysis Tool

In the BIA tab columns for Direct Costs of Downtime, Impact on Goodwill, and Additional Criticality Factors, use the drop-down menu to assign a score of zero to four based on levels of impact defined in the Scoring Criteria tab. For example, if an organization’s ERP is down, and that affects call center sales operations (e.g. ability to access customer records and process orders), the impact might be as described below:

• Loss of Revenue might score a two or three depending on the proportion of overall sales lost due to the downtime.
• The Impact on Customers might be a one or two depending on the extent that existing customers might be using the call center to purchase new products or services, and are frustrated by the inability to process orders.
• The Legal/Regulatory Compliance and Health or Safety Risk might be a zero.

On the other hand, if payroll processing is down, this may not impact revenue, but it certainly impacts internal goodwill and productivity.

Rank service criticality: gold, silver, and bronze

Gold

Mission critical services. An outage is catastrophic in terms of cost or public image/goodwill. Example: trading software at a financial institution.

Silver

Important to daily operations, but not mission critical. Example: email services at any large organization.

Bronze

Loss of these services is an inconvenience more than anything, though they do serve a purpose and will be missed if they are never brought back online. Example: ancient fax machines.

Info-Tech Best Practice

Info-Tech recommends gold, silver, and bronze because of this typology’s near universal recognition. If you would prefer a particular designation (it might help with internal comprehension), don’t hesitate to use that one instead.

Use the results of the business impact analysis to sort systems based on their criticality

1.1f 1 hour

Every organization has its own rules about how to categorize service importance. For some (consumer-facing businesses, perhaps) reputational damage may trump immediate costs.

Instructions

1. Gather a group of key stakeholders and project the completed Business Impact Analysis Tool onto a screen for them.
2. Share the definitions of gold, silver, and bronze services with them (if they are not familiar), and begin sorting the services by category,

• How long would it take to notice if a particular service went out?
• How important are the non-quantifiable damages that could come with an outage?

Input

• Results of the business impact analysis exercise

Output

• List of gold, silver, and bronze systems

Materials

• Projector
• Business Impact Analysis Tool
• Capacity Plan Template

Participants

• Infrastructure manager
• Enterprise architect

Leverage the rest of the BIA tool as part of your disaster recovery planning

Disaster recovery planning is a critical activity, and while it is a sort of availability management, it is beyond this project’s scope. You can complete the business impact analysis (including RTOs and RPOs) for the complete disaster recovery package.

See Info-Tech’s Create a Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Plan blueprint for instructions on how to complete your business impact analysis.

Step 1.2: Assign criticality ratings to services

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Create a list of dependencies for your most important applications.
• Identify important sub-components.
• Use best practices to develop and negotiate SLAs.

This involves the following participants:

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure team

Outcomes of this step

• List of dependencies of most important applications
• List of important sub-components
• SLAs based on best practices

Determine the base unit of the capacity you’re looking to purchase

Not every IT organization should approach capacity the same way. Needs scale, and larger organizations will inevitably deal in larger quantities.

"Cloud capacity management is not exactly the same as the ITIL version because ITIL has a focus on the component level. I actually don’t do that, because if I did I’d go crazy. There’s too many components in a cloud environment."

– Richie Mendoza, IT Consultant, SMITS Inc.

Consider the relationship between component capacity and service capacity

End users’ thoughts about IT are based on what they see. They are, in other words, concerned with service availability: does the organization have the ability to provide access to needed services?

Service

• Email
• CRM
• ERP

Component

• Switch
• SMTP server
• Archive database
• Storage

"You don’t ask the CEO or the guy in charge ‘What kind of response time is your requirement?’ He doesn’t really care. He just wants to make sure that all his customers are happy."

– Todd Evans, Capacity and Performance Management SME, IBM.

One telco solved its availability issues by addressing component capacity issues

CASE STUDY

Industry: Telecommunications

Source: Interview

Coffee and Wi-Fi – a match made in heaven

In tens of thousands of coffee shops around the world, patrons make ample use of complimentary Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is an important part of customers’ coffee shop experience, whether they’re online to check their email, do a YouTube, or update their Googles. So when one telco that provided Wi-Fi access for thousands of coffee shops started encountering availability issues, the situation was serious.

Wi-Fi, whack-a-mole, and web woes

The team responsible for resolving the issue took an ad hoc approach to resolving complaints, fixing issues as they came up instead of taking a systematic approach.

Resolution

Looking at the network as a whole, the capacity manager took a proactive approach by using data to identify and rank the worst service areas, and then directing the team responsible to fix those areas in order of the worst first, then the next worst, and so on. Soon the availability of Wi-Fi service was restored across the network.

Create a list of dependencies for your most important applications

1.2a 1.5 hours

Instructions

1. Work your way down the list of services outlined in step 1, starting with your gold systems. During the first iteration of this exercise select only 3-5 of your most important systems.
2. Write the name of each application on a sticky note or at the top of a whiteboard (leaving ample space below for dependency mapping).
3. In the first tier below the application, include the specific services that the general service provides.

• This will vary based on the service in question, but an example for email is sending, retrieving, retrieving online, etc.

Input

• List of important applications

Output

• List of critical dependencies

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers
• Sticky notes

Participants

• Infrastructure manager
• Enterprise architect

Info-Tech Insight

Dependency mapping can be difficult. Make sure you don’t waste effort creating detailed dependency maps for relatively unimportant services.

Dependency mapping can be difficult. Make sure you don’t waste effort creating detailed dependency maps for relatively unimportant services.

Ride sharing cannot work, at least not at maximum effectiveness, without these constituent components. When one or more of these components are absent or degraded, the service will become unavailable. This example illustrates some challenges of capacity management; some of these components are necessary, but beyond the ride-sharing company’s control.

Leverage a sample dependency tree for a common service

Info-Tech Best Practice

Email is an example here not because it is necessarily a “gold system,” but because it is common across industries. This is a useful exercise for any service, but it can be quite onerous, so it should be conducted on the most important systems first.

Separate the wheat from the chaff; identify important sub-components and separate them from unimportant ones

1.2b 1.5 hours

Use the bottom layer of the pyramid drawn in step 1.2a for a list of important sub-components.

Instructions

1. Record a list of the gold services identified in the previous activity. Leave space next to each service for sub-components.
2. Go through each relevant sub-component. Highlight those that are critical and could reasonably be expected to cause problems.

• Has this sub-component caused a problem in the past?
• Is this sub-component a bottleneck?
• What could cause this component to fail? Is it such an occurrence feasible?

Input

• List of important applications

Output

• List of critical dependencies

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Infrastructure manager
• Enterprise architect

Understand availability commitments with SLAs

With the rise of SaaS, cloud computing, and managed services, critical services and their components are increasingly external to IT.

• IT’s lack of access to the internal working of services does not let them off the hook for performance issues (as much as that might be the dream).
• Vendor management is availability management. Use the dependency map drawn earlier in this phase to highlight the components of critical services that rely on capacity that cannot be managed internally.
• For each of these services ensure that an appropriate SLA is in place. When acquiring new services, ensure that the vendor SLA meets business requirements.

In terms of service provision, capacity management is a form of availability management. Not all availability issues are capacity issues, but the inverse is true.

Info-Tech Insight

Capacity issues will always cause availability issues, but availability issues are not inherently capacity issues. Availability problems can stem from outages unrelated to capacity (e.g. power or vendor outages).

Use best practices to develop and negotiate SLAs

1.2c 20 minutes per service

When signing contracts with vendors, you will be presented with an SLA. Ensure that it meets your requirements.

1. Use the business impact analysis conducted in this project’s first step to determine your requirements. How much downtime can you tolerate for your critical services?
2. Once you have been presented with an SLA, be sure to scour it for tricks. Remember, just because a vendor offers “five nines” of availability doesn’t mean that you’ll actually get that much uptime. It could be that the vendor is comfortable eating the cost of downtime or that the contract includes provisions for planned maintenance. Whether or not the vendor anticipated your outage does little to mitigate the damage an outage can cause to your business, so be careful of these provisions.
3. Ensure that the person ultimately responsible for the SLA (the approver) understands the limitations of the agreement and the implications for availability.

Input

• List of external component dependencies

Output

• SLA requirements

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Infrastructure manager
• Enterprise architect

Info-Tech Insight

Vendors are sometimes willing to eat the cost of violating SLAs if they think it will get them a contract. Be careful with negotiation. Just because the vendor says they can do something doesn’t make it true.

Negotiate internal SLAs using Info-Tech’s rigorous process

Talking past each other can drive misalignment between IT and the business, inconveniencing all involved. Quantify your needs through an internal SLA as part of a comprehensive availability management plan.

See Info-Tech’s Improve IT-Business Alignment Through an Internal SLA blueprint for instructions on why you should develop internal SLAs and the potential benefits they bring.

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

1.2

Create a list of dependencies for your most important applications

Using the results of the business impact analysis, the analyst will guide workshop participants through a dependency mapping exercise that will eventually populate the Capacity Plan Template.

Phase 1 Guided Implementation

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

PHASE 2

Establish Visibility Into Core Systems

Step 2.1: Define your monitoring strategy

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Determine the indicators you should be tracking for each sub-component.

This involves the following participants:

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure team

Outcomes of this step

• List of indicators to track for each sub-component

Data has its significance—but also its limitations

The rise of big data can be a boon for capacity managers, but be warned: not all data is created equal. Bad data can lead to bad decisions – and unemployed capacity managers.

Your findings are only as good as your data. Remember: garbage in, garbage out. There are three characteristics of good data:*

1. Accuracy: is the data exact and correct? More detail and confidence is better.
2. Reliability: is the data consistent? In other words, if you run the same test twice will you get the same results?
3. Validity: is the information gleaned believable and relevant?

*National College of Teaching & Leadership, “Reliability and Validity”

"Data is king. Good data is absolutely essential to [the capacity manager] role."

– Adrian Blant, Independent Capacity Consultant, IT Capability Solutions

Info-Tech Best Practice

Every organization’s data needs are different; your data needs are going to be dictated by your services, delivery model, and business requirements. Make sure you don’t confuse volume with quality, even if others in your organization make that mistake.

Take advantage of technology to establish visibility into your systems

Managing your availability and capacity involves important decisions about what to monitor and how thresholds should be set.

• Use the list of critical applications developed through the business impact analysis and the list of components identified in the dependency mapping exercise to produce a plan for effectively monitoring component availability and capacity.
• The nature of IT service provision – the multitude of vendors providing hardware and services necessary for even simple IT services to work effectively – means that it is unlikely that capacity management will be visible through a single pane of glass. In other words, “email” and “CRM” don’t have a defined capacity. It always depends.
• Establishing visibility into systems involves identifying what needs to be tracked for each component.

Too much monitoring can be as bad as the inverse

In 2013, a security breach at US retailer Target compromised more than 70 million customers’ data. The company received an alert, but it was thought to be a false positive because the monitoring system produced so many false and redundant alerts. As a result of the daily deluge, staff did not respond to the breach in time.

Info-Tech Insight

Don’t confuse monitoring with management. While establishing visibility is a crucial step, it is only part of the battle. Move on to this project’s next phase to explore opportunities to improve your capacity/availability management process.

Determine the indicators you should be tracking for each sub-component

2.1a Tab 3 of the Capacity Snapshot Tool

It is nearly impossible to overstate the importance of data to the process of availability and capacity management. But the wrong data will do you no good.

Instructions

1. Open the Capacity Snapshot Tool to tab 2. The tool should have been populated in step 1.2 as part of the component mapping exercise.
2. For each service, determine which metric(s) would most accurately tell the component’s story. Consider the following questions when completing this activity (you may end up with more than one metric):

• How would the component’s capacity be measured (storage space, RAM, bandwidth, vCPUs)?
• Is the metric in question actionable?

Info-Tech Insight

Bottlenecks are bad. Use the Capacity Snapshot Tool (or another tool like it) to ensure that when the capacity manager leaves (on vacation, to another role, for good) the knowledge that they have accumulated does not leave as well.

Understand the limitations of this approach

Although we’ve striven to make it as easy as possible, this process will inevitably be cumbersome for organizations with a complicated set of software, hardware, and cloud services.

Tracking every single component in significant detail will produce a lot of noise for each bit of signal. The approach outlined here addresses that concern in two ways:

• A focus on gold services
• A focus on sub-components that have a reasonable likelihood of being problematic in the future.

Despite this effort, however, managing capacity at the component level is a daunting task. Ultimately, tools provided by vendors like SolarWinds and AppDynamics will fill in some of the gaps. Nevertheless, an understanding of the conceptual framework underlying availability and capacity management is valuable.

Step 2.2: Implement your monitoring tool/aggregator

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Clarify visibility.
• Determine whether or not you have sufficiently granular visibility.
• Develop strategies to .any visibility issues.

This involves the following participants:

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure team
• Applications personnel

Outcomes of this step

• Method for measuring and monitoring critical sub-components

Companies struggle with performance monitoring because 95% of IT shops don’t have full visibility into their environments

CASE STUDY

Industry: Financial Services

Source: AppDynamics

Challenge

• Users are quick to provide feedback when there is downtime or application performance degradation.
• The challenge for IT teams is that while they can feel the pain, they don’t have visibility into the production environment and thus cannot identify where the pain is coming from.
• The most common solution that organizations rely on is leveraging the log files for issue diagnosis. However, this method is slow and often unable to pinpoint the problem areas, leading to delays in problem resolution.

Solution

• Application and infrastructure teams need to work together to develop infrastructure flow maps and transaction profiles.
• These diagrams will highlight the path that each transaction travels across your infrastructure.
• Ideally at this point, teams will also capture latency breakdowns across every tier that the business transaction flows through.
  • This will ultimately kick start the baselining process.

Results

• Ninety-five percent of IT departments don’t have full visibility into their production environment. As a result, a slow business transaction will often require a war-room approach where SMEs from across the organization gather to troubleshoot.
• Having visibility into the production environment through infrastructure flow mapping and transaction profiling will help IT teams pinpoint problems.
  • At the very least, teams will be able to identify common problem areas and expedite the root-cause analysis process.

Source: “Just how complex can a Login Transaction be? Answer: Very!,” AppDynamics

Monitor your critical sub-components

Establishing a monitoring plan for your capacity involves answering two questions: can I see what I need to see, and can I see it with sufficient granularity?

• Having the right tool for the job is an important step towards effective capacity and availability management.
• Application performance management tools (APMs) are essential to the process, but they tend to be highly specific and vertically oriented, like using a microscope.
• Some product families can cover a wider range of capacity monitoring functions (SolarWinds, for example). It is still important, however, to codify your monitoring needs.

"You don’t use a microscope to monitor an entire ant farm, but you might use many microscopes to monitor specific ants."

– Fred Chagnon, Research Director, Infrastructure Practice, Info-Tech Research Group

Monitor your sub-components: clarify visibility

2.2a Tab 2 of the Capacity Snapshot Tool

The next step in capacity management is establishing whether or not visibility (in the broad sense) is available into critical sub-components.

Instructions

1. Open the Capacity Snapshot Tool and record the list of sub-components identified in the previous step.
2. For each sub-component answer the following question:

• Do I have easy access to the information I need to monitor to ensure this component remains available?

• What tool provides the information? Where can it be found?

Monitor your sub-components; determine whether or not you have sufficient granular visibility

2.2b Tab 2 of the Capacity Snapshot Tool

Like ideas and watches, not all types of visibility are created equal. Ensure that you have access to the right information to make capacity decisions.

Instructions

1. For each of the sub-components clarify the appropriate level of granularity for the visibility gained to be useful. In the case of storage, for example, is raw usage (in gigabytes) sufficient, or do you need a breakdown of what exactly is taking up the space? The network might be more complicated.
2. Record the details of this ideation in the adjacent column.
3. Select “Yes” or “No” from the drop-down menu to track the status of each sub-component.

For most mobile phone users, this breakdown is sufficient. For some, more granularity might be necessary.

Info-Tech Insight

Make note of monitoring tools and strategies. If anything changes, be sure to re-evaluate the visibility status. An outdated spreadsheet can lead to availability issues if management is unaware of looming problems.

Develop strategies to ameliorate any visibility issues

2.2c 1 hour

The Capacity Snapshot Tool color-codes your components by status. Green – visibility and granularity are both sufficient; yellow – visibility exists, though not at sufficient granularity; and red – visibility does not exist at all.

Instructions

1. Write each of the yellow and red sub-components on a whiteboard or piece of chart paper.
2. Brainstorm amelioration strategies for each of the problematic sub-components.

• Does the current monitoring tool have sufficient functionality?
• Does it need to be further configured/customized?
• Do we need a whole new tool?

Input

• Sub-components
• Capacity Snapshot Tool

Output

• Amelioration strategies

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers
• Capacity Snapshot Tool

Participants

• Infrastructure manager

Info-Tech Best Practice

It might be that there is no amelioration strategy. Make note of this difficulty and highlight it as part of the risk section of the Capacity Plan Template.

See Info-Tech’s projects on storage and network modernization for additional details

Leverage other products for additional details on how to modernize your network and storage services.

The process of modernizing the network is fraught with vestigial limitations. Develop a program to gather requirements and plan.

As part of the blueprint, Modernize Enterprise Storage, the Modernize Enterprise Storage Workbook includes a section on storage capacity planning.

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

2.2

Develop strategies to ameliorate visibility issues

The analyst will guide workshop participants in brainstorming potential solutions to visibility issues and record them in the Capacity Snapshot Tool.

Phase 2 Guided Implementation

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

PHASE 3

Solicit and Incorporate Business Needs

Step 3.1: Solicit business needs and gather data

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Build relationships with business stakeholders.
• Analyze usage data and identify trends.
• Correlate usage trends with business needs.

This involves the following participants:

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure team members
• Business stakeholders

Outcomes of this step

• System for involving business stakeholders in the capacity planning process
• Correlated data on business level, service level, and infrastructure level capacity usage

Summarize your capacity planning activities in the Capacity Plan Template

The availability and capacity management summary card pictured here is a handy way to capture the results of the activities undertaken in the following phases. Note its contents carefully, and be sure to record specific outputs where appropriate. One such card should be completed for each of the gold services identified in the project’s first phase. Make note of the results of the activities in the coming phase, and populate the Capacity Snapshot Tool. These will help you populate the tool.

Info-Tech Best Practice

The Capacity Plan Template is designed to be a part of a broader mapping strategy. It is not a replacement for a dedicated monitoring tool.

Analyze historical trends as a crucial source of data

The first place to look for information about your organization is not industry benchmarks or your gut (though those might both prove useful).

• Where better to look than internally? Use the data you’ve gathered from your APM tool or other sources to understand your historical capacity needs and to highlight any periods of unavailability.
• Consider monitoring the status of the capacity of each of your crucial components. The nature of this monitoring will vary based on the component in question. It can range from a rough Excel sheet all the way to a dedicated application performance monitoring tool.

"In all cases the very first thing to do is to look at trending…The old adage is ‘you don’t steer a boat by its wake,’ however it’s also true that if something is growing at, say, three percent a month and it has been growing at three percent a month for the last twelve months, there’s a fairly good possibility that it’s going to carry on going in that direction."

– Mike Lynch, Consultant, CapacityIQ

Gather relevant data at the business level

3.1a 2 hours per service

A holistic approach to capacity management involves peering beyond the beaded curtain partitioning IT from the rest of the organization and tracking business metrics.

Instructions

1. Your service/application owners know how changes in business activities impact their systems. Business level capacity management involves responding to those changes. Ask service/application owners what changes will impact their capacity. Examples include:

• Business volume (net new customers, number of transactions)
• Staff changes (new hires, exits, etc.)

Input

• Brainstorming
• List of gold services

Output

• Business level data

Materials

• In-house solution or commercial tool

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Application/service owners

Gather relevant data at the service level

3.1b 2 hours per service

One level of abstraction down is the service level. Service level capacity management, recall that service level capacity management is about ensuring that IT is meeting SLAs in its service provision.

Instructions

1. There should be internal SLAs for each service IT offers. (If not, that’s a good place to start. See Info-Tech’s research on the subject.) Prod each of your service owners for information on the metrics that are relevant for their SLAs. Consider the following:

• Peak hours, requests per second, etc.
• This will usually include some APM data.

Input

• Brainstorming
• List of gold services

Output

• Service level data

Materials

• In-house solution or commercial tool

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Application/service owners

Leverage the visibility into your infrastructure components and compare all of your data over time

You established visibility into your components in the second phase of this project. Use this data, and that gathered at the business and service levels, to begin analyzing your demand over time.

• Different organizations will approach this issue differently. Those with a complicated service catalog and a dedicated capacity manager might employ a tool like TeamQuest. If your operation is small, or you need to get your availability and capacity management activities underway as quickly as possible, you might consider using a simple spreadsheet software like Excel.
• If you choose the latter option, select a level of granularity (monthly, weekly, etc.) and produce a line graph in Excel.
• Example: Employee count (business metric)

Note: the strength of this approach is that it is easy to visualize. Use the same timescale to facilitate simple comparison.

Manage, don’t just monitor; mountains of data need to be turned into information

Information lets you make a decision. Understand the questions you don’t need to ask, and ask the right ones.

"Often what is really being offered by many analytics solutions is just more data or information – not insights."

– Brent Dykes, Director of Data Strategy, Domo

Info-Tech Best Practice

You can have all the data in the world and absolutely nothing valuable to add. Don’t fall for this trap. Use the activities in this phase to structure your data collection operation and ensure that your organization’s availability and capacity management plan is data driven.

Analyze historical trends and track your services’ status

3.1c Tab 3 of the Capacity Snapshot Tool

At-a-glance – it’s how most executives consume all but the most important information. Create a dashboard that tracks the status of your most important systems.

Instructions

1. Consult infrastructure leaders for information about lead times for new capacity for relevant sub-components and include that information in the tool.

• Look to historical lead times. (How long does it traditionally take to get more storage?)
• If you’re not sure, contact an in-house expert, or speak to your vendor

This tool collates and presents information gathered from other sources. It is not a substitute for a performance monitoring tool.

Build a list of key business stakeholders

3.1d 10 minutes

Stakeholder analysis is crucial. Lines of authority can be diffuse. Understand who needs to be involved in the capacity management process early on.

Instructions

1. With the infrastructure team, brainstorm a group of departments, roles, and people who may impact demand on capacity.
2. Go through the list with your team and identify stakeholders from two groups:

• Line of business: who in the business makes use of the service?
• Application owner: who in IT is responsible for ensuring the service is up?

Input

• Gold systems
• Personnel Information

Output

• List of key business stakeholders

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure staff

Info-Tech Best Practice

Consider which departments are most closely aligned with the business processes that fuel demand. Prioritize those that have the greatest impact. Consider the stakeholders who will make purchasing decisions for increasing infrastructure capacity.

Organize stakeholder meetings

3.1e 10 hours

Establishing a relationship with your stakeholders is a necessary step in managing your capacity and availability.

Instructions

1. Gather as many of the stakeholders identified in the previous activity as you can and present information on availability and capacity management

• If you can’t get everyone in the same room, a virtual meeting or even an email blast could get the job done.

• Consider highlighting the trade-offs between cost and availability.

Input

• List of business stakeholders
• Hard work

Output

• Working relationship, trust
• Regular meetings

Materials

• Work ethic
• Executive brief

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Business stakeholders

Info-Tech Insight

The best capacity managers develop new business processes that more closely align their role with business stakeholders. Building these relationships takes hard work, and you must first earn the trust of the business.

Bake stakeholders into the planning process

3.1f Ongoing

Convince, don’t coerce. Stakeholders want the same thing you do. Bake them into the planning process as a step towards this goal.

1. Develop a system to involve stakeholders regularly in the capacity planning process.

• Your system will vary depending on the structure and culture of your organization.
• See the case study on the following slide for ideas.
• It may be as simple as setting a recurring reminder in your own calendar to touch base with stakeholders.

• Ensure stakeholders have reasonable expectations about IT’s available resources, the costs of providing capacity, and the lead times required to source additional needed capacity.

Input

• List of business stakeholders
• Ideas

Output

• Capacity planning process that involves stakeholders

Materials

• Meeting rooms

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Business stakeholders
• Infrastructure team

A capacity manager in financial services wrangled stakeholders and produced results

CASE STUDY

Industry: Financial Services

Source: Interview

In financial services, availability is king

In the world of financial services, availability is absolutely crucial. High-value trades occur at all hours, and any institution that suffers outages runs the risk of losing tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention reputational damage.

People know what they want, but sometimes they have to be herded

While line of business managers and application owners understand the value of capacity management, it can be difficult to establish the working relationship necessary for a fruitful partnership.

Proactively building relationships keeps services available

He built relationships with all the department heads on the business side, and all the application owners.

• He met with department heads quarterly.
• He met with application owners and business liaisons monthly.

He established a steering committee for capacity.

He invited stakeholders to regular capacity planning meetings.

• The first half of each meeting was high-level outlook, such as business volume and IT capacity utilization, and included stakeholders from other departments.
• The second half of the meeting was more technical, serving the purpose for the infrastructure team.

He scheduled lunch and learn sessions with business analysts and project managers.

• These are the gatekeepers of information, and should know that IT needs to be involved when things come down the pipeline.

Step 3.2: Analyze data and project future needs

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Solicit needs from the business.
• Map business needs to technical requirements, and technical requirements to infrastructure requirements.
• Identify inefficiencies in order to remedy them.
• Compare the data across business, component, and service levels, and project your capacity needs.

This involves the following participants:

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure team members
• Business stakeholders

Outcomes of this step

• Model of how business processes relate to technical requirements and their demand on infrastructure
• Method for projecting future demand for your organization’s infrastructure
• Comparison of current capacity usage to projected demand

“Nobody tells me anything!” – the capacity manager’s lament

Sometimes “need to know” doesn’t register with sales or marketing. Nearly every infrastructure manager can share a story about a time when someone has made a decision that has critically impacted IT infrastructure without letting anyone in IT in on the “secret.”

In brief

Imagine working for a media company as an infrastructure capacity manager. Now imagine that the powers that be have decided to launch a content-focused web service. Seems like something they would do, right? Now imagine you find out about it the same way the company’s subscribers do. This actually happened – and it shouldn’t have. But a similar lack of alignment makes this a real possibility for any organization. If you don’t establish a systematic plan for soliciting and incorporating business requirements, prepare to lose a chunk of your free time. The business should never be able to say, in response to “nobody tells me anything,” “nobody asked.”

Pictured: an artist’s rendering of the capacity manager in question.

Directly solicit requirements from the business

3.2a 30 minutes per stakeholder

Once you’ve established, firmly, that everyone’s on the same team, meet individually with the stakeholders to assess capacity.

Instructions

1. Schedule a one-on-one meeting with each line of business manager (stakeholders identified in 3.1). Ideally this will be recurring.

• Experienced capacity managers suggest doing this monthly.

• What are some upcoming major initiatives?
• Is the department going to expand or contract in a noticeable way?
• Have customers taken to a particular product more than others?

Input

• Stakeholder opinions

Output

• Business requirements

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure staff

Info-Tech Insight

Sometimes line of business managers will evade or ignore you when you come knocking. They do this because they don’t know and they don’t want to give you the wrong information. Explain that a best guess is all you can ask for and allay their fears.

Below, you will find more details about what to look for when soliciting information from the line of business manager you’ve roped into your scheme.

1. Consider the following:

• Projected sales pipeline
• Business growth
• Seasonal cycles
• Marketing campaigns
• New applications and features
• New products and services

Directly solicit requirements from the business (optional)

3.2a 1 hour

IT staff and line of business staff come with different skillsets. This can lead to confusion, but it doesn’t have to. Develop effective information solicitation techniques.

Instructions

1. Gather your IT staff in a room with a whiteboard. As a group, select a gold service/line of business manager you would like to use as a “practice dummy.”
2. Have everyone write down a question they would ask of the line of business representative in a hypothetical business/service capacity discussion.
3. As a group discuss the merits of the questions posed:

• Are they likely to yield productive information?
• Are they too vague or specific?
• Is the person in question likely to know the answer?
• Is the information requested a guarded trade secret?

Input

• Workshop participants’ ideas

Output

• Interview skills

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers
• Sticky notes

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure staff

Map business needs to technical requirements, and technical requirements to infrastructure requirements

3.2b 5 hours

When it comes to mapping technical requirements, IT alone has the ability to effectively translate business needs.

Instructions

1. Use your notes from stakeholder meetings to assess the impact of any changes on gold systems.
2. For each system brainstorm with infrastructure staff (and any technical experts as necessary) about what the information gleaned from stakeholder discussions. Consider the following discussion points:

• How has demand for the service been trending? Does it match what the business is telling us?
• Have we had availability issues in the past?
• Has the business been right with their estimates in the past?

• E.g. how much RAM does a new email user require?

Input

• Business needs

Output

• Technical and infrastructure requirements

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure staff

Info-Tech Insight

Adapt the analysis to the needs of your organization. One capacity manager called the one-to-one mapping of business process to infrastructure demand the Holy Grail of capacity management. If this level of precision isn’t attainable, develop your own working estimates using the higher-level data

Avoid putting too much faith in the cloud as a solution to your problem

Has the rise of on-demand, functionally unlimited services eliminated the need for capacity and availability management?

Info-Tech Insight

The cloud comes at the cost of detailed performance data. Sourcing a service through an SLA with a third party increases the need to perform your own performance testing of gold level applications. See performance monitoring.

Beware Parkinson’s law

A consequence of our infinite capacity for creativity, people have the enviable skill of making work. In 1955, C. Northcote Parkinson pointed out this fact in The Economist . What are the implications for capacity management?

"It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street."

C. Northcote Parkinson, The Economist, 1955

Info-Tech Insight

If you give people lots of capacity, they will use it. Most shops are overprovisioned, and in some cases that’s throwing perfectly good money away. Don’t be afraid to prod if someone requests something that doesn’t seem right.

Optimally align demand and capacity

When it comes to managing your capacity, look for any additional efficiencies.

Questions to ask:

• Are there any infrastructure services that are not being used to their full potential, sitting idle, or allocated to non-critical or zombie functions?
  • Are you managing your virtual servers? If, for example, you experience a seasonal spike in demand, are you leaving virtual machines running after the fact?
• Do your organization’s policies and your infrastructure setup allow for the use of development resources for production during periods of peak demand?
• Can you make organizational or process changes in order to satisfy demand more efficiently?

In brief

Who isn’t a sports fan? Big games mean big stakes for pool participants and armchair quarterbacks—along with pressure on the network as fans stream games from their work computers. One organization suffered from this problem, and, instead of taking a hardline and banning all streams, opted to stream the game on a large screen in a conference room where those interested could work for its duration. This alleviated strain on the network and kept staff happy.

Shutting off an idle cloud to cut costs

CASE STUDY

Industry:Professional Services

Source:Interview

24/7 AWS = round-the-clock costs

A senior developer realized that his development team had been leaving AWS instances running without any specific reason.

Why?

The development team appreciated the convenience of an always-on instance and, because the people spinning them up did not handle costs, the problem wasn’t immediately apparent.

Resolution

In his spare time over the course of a month, the senior developer wrote a program to manage the servers, including shutting them down during times when they were not in use and providing remote-access start-up when required. His team alone saved $30,000 in costs over the next six months, and his team lead reported that it would have been more than worth paying the team to implement such a project on company time.

Identify inefficiencies in order to remediate them

3.2c 20 minutes per service

Instructions

1. Gather the infrastructure team together and discuss existing capacity and demand. Use the inputs from your data analysis and stakeholder meetings to set the stage for your discussion.
2. Solicit ideas about potential inefficiencies from your participants:

• Are VMs effectively allocated? If you need 7 VMs to address a spike, are those VMs being reallocated post-spike?
• Are developers leaving instances running in the cloud?
• Are particular services massively overprovisioned?
• What are the biggest infrastructure line items? Are there obvious opportunities for cost reduction there?

Input

• Gold systems
• Data inputs

Output

• Inefficiencies

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure staff

Info-Tech Insight

The most effective capacity management takes a holistic approach and looks at the big picture in order to find ways to eliminate unnecessary infrastructure usage, or to find alternate or more efficient sources of required capacity.

Dodging the toll troll by rerouting traffic

CASE STUDY

Industry:Telecommunications

Source: Interview

High-cost lines

The capacity manager at a telecommunications provider mapped out his firm’s network traffic and discovered they were using a number of VP circuits (inter building cross connects) that were very expensive on the scale of their network.

Paying the toll troll

These VP circuits were supplying needed network services to the telecom provider’s clients, so there was no way to reduce this demand.

Resolution

The capacity manager analyzed where the traffic was going and compared this to the cost of the lines they were using. After performing the analysis, he found he could re-route much of the traffic away from the VP circuits and save on costs while delivering the same level of service to their users.

Compare the data across business, component, and service levels, and project your capacity needs

3.2d 2 hour session/meeting

Make informed decisions about capacity. Remember: retain all documentation. It might come in handy for the justification of purchases.

Instructions

1. Using either a dedicated tool or generic spreadsheet software like Excel or Sheets, evaluate capacity trends. Ask the following questions:

• Are there times when application performance degraded, and the service level was disrupted?
• Are there times when certain components or systems neared, reached, or exceeded available capacity?
• Are there seasonal variations in demand?
• Are there clear trends, such as ongoing growth of business activity or the usage of certain applications?
• What are the ramifications of trends or patterns in relation to infrastructure capacity?

Compare current capacity to your projections

3.2e Section 5 of the Capacity Plan Template

Capacity management (and, by extension, availability management) is a combination of two balancing acts: cost against capacity and supply and demand.*

Instructions

1. Compare your projections with your reality. You already know whether or not you have enough capacity given your lead times. But do you have too much? Compare your sub-component capacity projections to your current state.
2. Highlight any outliers. Is there a particular service that is massively overprovisioned?
3. Evaluate the reasons for the overprovisioning.

• Is the component critically important?
• Did you get a great deal on hardware?
• Is it an oversight?

*Office of Government Commerce 2001, 119.

In brief

The fractured nature of the capacity management space means that every organization is going to have a slightly different tooling strategy. No vendor has dominated, and every solution requires some level of customization. One capacity manager (a cloud provider, no less!) relayed a tale about a capacity management Excel sheet programmed with 5,000+ lines of code. As much work as that is, a bespoke solution is probably unavoidable.

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

3.2

Map business needs to technical requirements and technical requirements to infrastructure requirements

The analyst will guide workshop participants in using their organization’s data to map out the relationships between applications, technical requirements, and the underlying infrastructure usage.

Phase 3 Guided Implementation

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

PHASE 4

Identify and Mitigate Risks

Step 4.1: Identify and mitigate risks

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Identify potential risks.
• Determine strategies to mitigate risks.
• Complete your capacity management plan.

This involves the following participants:

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure team members
• Business stakeholders

Outcomes of this step

• Strategies for reducing risks
• Capacity management plan

Understand what happens when capacity/availability management fails

1. Services become unavailable. If availability and capacity management are not constantly practiced, an inevitable consequence is downtime or a reduction in the quality of that service. Critical sub-component failures can knock out important systems on their own.
2. Money is wasted. In response to fears about availability, it’s entirely possible to massively overprovision or switch entirely to a pay-as-you-go model. This, unfortunately, brings with it a whole host of other problems, including overspending. Remember: infinite capacity means infinite potential cost.
3. IT remains reactive and is unable to contribute more meaningfully to the organization. If IT is constantly putting out capacity/availability-related fires, there is no room for optimization and activities to increase organizational maturity. Effective availability and capacity management will allow IT to focus on other work.

Mitigate availability and capacity risks

Availability: how often a service is usable (that is to say up and not too degraded to be effective). Consequences of reduced availability can include financial losses, impacted customer goodwill, and reduced faith in IT more generally.

Causes of availability issues:

• Poor capacity management – a service becomes unavailable when there is insufficient supply to meet demand. This is the result of poor capacity management.
• Scheduled maintenance – services go down for maintenance with some regularity. This needs to be baked into service-level negotiations with vendors.
• Vendor outages – sometimes vendors experience unplanned outages. There is typically a contract provision that covers unplanned outages, but that doesn’t change the fact that your service will be interrupted.

Capacity: a particular component’s/service’s/business’ wiggle room. In other words, its usage ceiling.

Causes of capacity issues:

• Poor demand management – allowing users to run amok without any regard for how capacity is sourced and paid for.
• Massive changes in legitimate demand – more usage means more demand.
• Poor capacity planning – predictable changes in demand that go unaddressed can lead to capacity issues.

Add additional potential causes of availability and capacity risks as needed

4.1a 30 minutes

Availability and capacity issues can stem from a number of different causes. Include a list in your availability and capacity management plan.

Instructions

1. Gather the group together. Go around the room and have participants provide examples of incidents and problems that have been the result of availability and capacity issues.
2. Pose questions to the group about the source of those availability and capacity issues.

• What could have been done differently to avoid these issues?
• Was the availability/capacity issue a result of a faulty internal/external SLA?

Input

• Capacity Snapshot Tool results

Output

• Additional sources of availability and capacity risks

Materials

• Capacity Plan Template

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure staff

Info-Tech Insight

Availability and capacity problems result in incidents, critical incidents, and problems. These are addressed in a separate project (incident and problem management), but information about common causes can streamline that process.

Identify capacity risks and mitigate them

4.1b 30 minutes

Based on your understanding of your capacity needs (through written SLAs and informal but regular meetings with the business) highlight major risks you foresee.

Instructions

1. Make a chart with two columns on a whiteboard. They should be labelled “risk” and “mitigation” respectively.
2. Record risks to capacity you have identified in earlier activities.

• Refer to the Capacity Snapshot Tool for components that are highlighted in red and yellow. These are specific components that present special challenges. Identify the risk(s) in as much detail as possible. Include service and business risks as well.
• Examples: a marketing push will put pressure on the web server; a hiring push will require more Office 365 licenses; a downturn in registration will mean that fewer VMs will be required to run the service.

Input

• Capacity Snapshot Tool results

Output

• Inefficiencies

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure staff

Info-Tech Insight

It’s an old adage, but it checks out: don’t come to the table armed only with problems. Be a problem solver and prove IT’s value to the organization.

Identify capacity risks and mitigate them (cont.)

4.1b 1.5 hours

Instructions (cont.)

3. Begin developing mitigation strategies. Options for responding to known capacity risks fall into one of two camps:

• Acceptance: responding to the risk is costlier than acknowledging its existence without taking any action. For gold systems, acceptance is typically not acceptable.
• Mitigation: limiting/reducing, eliminating, or transferring risk (Herrera) comprise the sort of mitigation discussed here.
  • Limiting/reducing: taking steps to improve the capacity situation, but accepting some level of risk (spinning up a new VM, pushing back on demands from the business, promoting efficiency).
  • Eliminating: the most comprehensive (and most expensive) mitigation strategy, elimination could involve purchasing a new server or, at the extreme end, building a new datacenter.
  • Transfer: “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” in the words of capacity manager Todd Evans, is one potential way to limit your exposure. Is there a less critical service that can be sacrificed to keep your gold service online?

Input

• Capacity Snapshot Tool results

Output

• Capacity risk mitigations

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure staff

Info-Tech Insight

It’s an old adage, but it checks out: don’t come to the table armed only with problems. Be a problem solver and prove IT’s value to the organization.

Identify availability risks and mitigate them

4.1c 30 minutes

While capacity management is a form of availability management, it is not the only form. In this activity, outline the specific nature of threats to availability.

Instructions

1. Make a chart with two columns on a whiteboard. They should be labelled “risk” and “mitigation” respectively.
2. Begin brainstorming general availability risks based on the following sources of information/categories:

• Vendor outages
• Disaster recovery
• Historical availability issues

Input

• Capacity Snapshot Tool results

Output

• Availability risks and mitigations

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure staff

Info-Tech Best Practice

A dynamic central repository is a good way to ensure that availability issues stemming from a variety of causes are captured and mitigated.

Identify availability risks and mitigate them (cont.)

4.1c 1.5 hours

Although it is easier said than done, identifying potential mitigations is a crucial part of availability management as an activity.

Instructions (cont.)

3. Begin developing mitigation strategies. Options for responding to known capacity risks fall into one of two camps:

• Acceptance – responding to the risk is costlier than taking it on. Some unavailability is inevitable, between maintenance and unscheduled downtime. Record this, though it may not require immediate action.
• Mitigation strategies:
  • Limiting/reducing – taking steps to increase availability of critical systems. This could include hot spares for unreliable systems or engaging a new vendor.
  • Eliminating – the most comprehensive (and most expensive) mitigation strategy. It could include selling.
  • Transfer – “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” in the words of capacity manager Todd Evans, is one potential way to limit your exposure. Is there a less critical service that can be sacrificed to keep your gold service online?

Input

• Capacity Snapshot Tool results

Output

• Availability risks and mitigations

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Markers

Participants

• Capacity manager
• Infrastructure staff

Iterate on the process and present your completed availability and capacity management plan

The stakeholders consulted as part of the process will be interested in its results. Share them, either in person or through a collaboration tool.

The current status of your availability and capacity management plan should be on the agenda for every stakeholder meeting. Direct the stakeholders’ attention to the parts of the document that are relevant to them, and solicit their thoughts on the document’s accuracy. Over time you should get a pretty good idea of who among your stakeholder group is skilled at projecting demand, and who over- or underestimates, and by how much. This information will improve your projections and, therefore, your management over time.

Info-Tech Insight

Use the experience gained and the artifacts generated to build trust with the business. The meetings should be regular, and demonstrating that you’re actually using the information for good is likely to make hesitant participants in the process more likely to open up.

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop.

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

4.1

Identify capacity risks and mitigate them

The analyst will guide workshop participants in identifying potential risks to capacity and determining strategies for mitigating them.

Phase 4 Guided Implementation

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Insight breakdown

Insight 1

Components are critical to availability and capacity management.

The CEO doesn’t care about the SMTP server. She cares about meeting customer needs and producing profit. For IT capacity and availability managers, though, the devil is in the details. It only takes one faulty component to knock out a service. Keep track and keep the lights on.

Insight 2

Ask what the business is working on, not what they need.

If you ask them what they need, they’ll tell you – and it won’t be cheap. Find out what they’re going to do, and use your expertise to service those needs. Use your IT experience to estimate the impact of business and service level changes on the components that secure the availability you need.

Insight 3

Cloud shmoud.

The role of the capacity manager might be changing with the advent of the public cloud, but it has not disappeared. Capacity managers in the age of the cloud are responsible for managing vendor relationships, negotiating external SLAs, projecting costs and securing budgets, reining in prodigal divisions, and so on.

Summary of accomplishment

Knowledge Gained

• Impact of downtime on the organization
• Gold systems
• Key dependencies and sub-components
• Strategy for monitoring components
• Strategy for soliciting business needs
• Projected capacity needs
• Availability and capacity risks and mitigations

Processes Optimized

• Availability management
• Capacity management

Deliverables Completed

• Business Impact Analysis
• Capacity Plan Template

Project step summary

Client Project: Develop an Availability and Capacity Management Plan

1. Conduct a business impact analysis
2. Assign criticality ratings to services
3. Define your monitoring strategy
4. Implement your monitoring tool/aggregator
5. Solicit business needs and gather data
6. Analyze data and project future needs
7. Identify and mitigate risks

Info-Tech Insight

This project has the ability to fit the following formats:

• Onsite workshop by Info-Tech Research Group consulting analysts.
• Do-it-yourself with your team.
• Remote delivery via Info-Tech Guided Implementation.

Research contributors and experts

Adrian Blant, Independent Capacity Consultant, IT Capability Solutions

Adrian has over 15 years' experience in IT infrastructure. He has built capacity management business processes from the ground up, and focused on ensuring a productive dialogue between IT and the business.

James Zhang, Senior Manager Disaster Recovery, AIG Technology

James has over 20 years' experience in IT and 10 years' experience in capacity management. Throughout his career, he has focused on creating new business processes to deliver value and increase efficiency over the long term.

Mayank Banerjee, CTO, Global Supply Chain Management, HelloFresh

Mayank has over 15 years' experience across a wide range of technologies and industries. He has implemented highly automated capacity management processes as part of his role of owning and solving end-to-end business problems.

Mike Lynch, Consultant, CapacityIQ

Mike has over 20 years' experience in IT infrastructure. He takes a holistic approach to capacity management to identify and solve key problems, and has developed automated processes for mapping performance data to information that can inform business decisions.

Paul Waguespack, Manager of Application Systems Engineering, Tufts Health Plan

Paul has over 10 years' experience in IT. He has specialized in implementing new applications and functionalities throughout their entire lifecycle, and integrating with all aspects of IT operations.

Richie Mendoza, IT Consultant, SMITS Inc.

Richie has over 10 years' experience in IT infrastructure. He has specialized in using demand forecasting to guide infrastructure capacity purchasing decisions, to provide availability while avoiding costly overprovisioning.

Rob Thompson, President, IT Tools & Process

Rob has over 30 years’ IT experience. Throughout his career he has focused on making IT a generator of business value. He now runs a boutique consulting firm.

Todd Evans, Capacity and Performance Management SME, IBM

Todd has over 20 years' experience in capacity and performance management. At Kaiser Permanente, he established a well-defined mapping of the businesses workflow processes to technical requirements for applications and infrastructure.

Bibliography

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Allen, Katie. “Work Also Shrinks to Fit the Time Available: And We Can Prove It.” The Guardian. 25 Oct. 2017.

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Armandpour, Tim. “Lies Vendors Tell about Service Level Agreements and How to Negotiate for Something Better.” Network World. 12 Jan 2016.

“Availability Management.” ITIL and ITSM World. 2001. Web.

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BMC Capacity Optimization. BMC. 24 Oct 2017. Web.

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Francis, Ryan. “False positives still cause threat alert fatigue.” CSO. May 3, 2017. Web.

Frymire, Scott. "Capacity Planning vs. Capacity Analytics." ScienceLogic. 24 Oct. 2017. Web.

Glossary. Exin. Aug. 2017. Web.

Herrera, Michael. “Four Types of Risk Mitigation and BCM Governance, Risk and Compliance.” MHA Consulting. May 17, 2013.

Hill, Jon. How to Do Capacity Planning. TeamQuest. 24 Oct. 2017. Web.

“How to Create an SLA in 7 Easy Steps.” ITSM Perfection. 25 Oct. 2017. Web.

Hunter, John. “Myth: If You Can’t Measure It: You Can’t Manage It.” W. Edwards Deming Institute Blog. 13 Aug 2015. Web.

IT Service Criticality. U of Bristol. 24 Oct. 2017. Web.

"ITIL Capacity Management." BMC's Complete Guide to ITIL. BMC Software. 22 Dec. 2016. Web.

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Landgrave, Tim. "Plan for Effective Capacity and Availability Management in New Systems." TechRepublic. 10 Oct. 2002. Web.

Longoria, Gina. “Hewlett Packard Enterprise Goes After Amazon Public Cloud in Enterprise Storage.” Forbes. 2 Dec. 2016. Web.

Maheshwari, Umesh. “Understanding Storage Capacity.” NimbleStorage. 7 Jan. 2016. Web.

Mappic, Sandy. “Just how complex can a Login Transaction be? Answer: Very!” Appdynamics. Dec. 11 2011. Web.

Miller, Ron. “AWS Fires Back at Larry Ellison’s Claims, Saying It’s Just Larry Being Larry.” Tech Crunch. 2 Oct. 2017. Web.

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Newland, Chris, et al. Enterprise Capacity Management. CETI, Ohio State U. 24 Oct. 2017. Web.

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Transforming the Information Infrastructure: Build, Manage, Optimize. Asigra. Aug. 2017. Web.

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Wolstenholme, Andrew. Final internal Audit Report: IT Availability and Capacity (IA 13 519/F). Transport For London. 23 Feb. 2015. Web.

Improve IT Team Effectiveness

Implement the four critical factors required for all high-performing teams.

Analyst Perspective

All teams need to operate effectively; however, IT teams experience unique challenges.

IT often struggles to move from an effective to a high-performing team due to the very nature of their work. They work across multiple disciplines and with multiple stakeholders.

When operating across many disciplines it can become more difficult to identify the connections or points of interactions that define effective teams and separate them from being a working group or focus on their individual performance.

IT employees also work in close partnership with multiple teams outside their IT domain, which can create confusion as to what team are they a primary member of. The tendency is to advocate for or on behalf of the team they primarily work with instead of bringing the IT mindset and alignment to IT roadmap and goals to serve their stakeholders.

Amanda Mathieson
Research Director, People & Leadership Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

The Challenge

Organizations rely on team-based work arrangements to provide organizational benefits and better navigate the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) operating environment.

This is becoming more challenging in a hybrid environment as interactions now rely less on casual encounters and must become more intentional.

A high-performing team is more than productive. They are more resilient and able to recognize opportunities. They are proactive instead of reactive due to the trust and high level of communication and collaboration.

Common Obstacles

IT teams are more unique, which also provides unique challenges other teams don't experience:

• Multiple disciplines that tend to operate in parallel versus within a sequence of events
• Multiple incumbent roles where people operate in parallel versus needing to share information to produce an outcome
• Multiple stakeholders that create a tension with competing priorities

Info-Tech's Approach

Use Info-Tech's phased approach to diagnose your team and use the IDEA model to drive team effectiveness.

The IDEA model includes four factors to identify team challenges and focus on areas for improvement: identity, decision making, exchanges within the team, and atmosphere of team psychological safety.

Info-Tech Insight

IT teams often fail to reach their full potential because teamwork presents unique challenges and complexities due to the work they do across the organization and within their own group. Silos, not working together, and not sharing knowledge are all statements that indicate a problem. As a leader it's difficult to determine what to do first to navigate the different desires and personalities on a team.

How this blueprint will help

Assess, diagnose, and address issues to realize your team's full potential.

This research helps IT support:

• Work Teams: Operate under one organizational unit or function. Their membership is generally stable with well-defined roles.
• Project Teams: Typically, are time-limited teams formed to produce a particular output or project. Their membership and expertise tend to vary over time.
• Management or Leadership Teams: Provide direction and guidance to the organization and are accountable for overall performance. Membership is structured by the hierarchy of the organization and includes a diverse set of skills, experience, and expertise.

Traditionally, organizations have tried to fix ineffective teams by focusing on these four issues: composition, leadership competencies, individual-level performance, and organizational barriers. While these factors are important, our research has shown it is beneficial to focus on the four factors of effective teams addressed in this blueprint first. Then, if additional improvement is needed, shift your focus to the traditional issue areas.

Common obstacles

These barriers make it difficult to address effectiveness for many IT teams:

• Teams do not use one standard set of processes because they may have a wide variety of assignments requiring different sets of processes.
  Source: Freshworks

• There are multiple disciplines within IT that require vastly different skill sets. Finding the connection points can be difficult when on the surface it seems like success doesn't require interconnectivity.
• IT has many people in the same roles that act independently based on the stakeholder or internal customer they are serving. This can lead to duplication of effort if information and solutions aren't shared.
• IT serves many parts of the organization that can bring competing priorities both across the groups they support and with the IT strategy and roadmap itself. Many IT leaders work directly in or for the business, which can see them associate with the internal client team more than their IT team – another layer of conflicting priorities.

IT also experience challenges with maturity and data silos

Current realities require teams to operate effectively

Teams struggle to realize their full potential

Poor Communication

To excel, teams must recognize and adapt to the unique communication styles and preferences of their members.

To find the "just right" amount of communication for your team, communication and collaboration expectations should be set upfront.

85% of tech workers don't feel comfortable speaking in meetings.
Source: Hypercontext, 2022

Decision Making

Decision making is a key component of team effectiveness. Teams are often responsible for decisions without having proper authority.

Establishing a team decision-making process becomes more complicated when appropriate decision-making processes vary according to the level of interdependency between team members and organizational culture.

20% of respondents say their organization excels at decision making.
Source: McKinsey, 2019

Resolving Conflicts

It is common for teams to avoid/ignore conflict – often out of fear. People fail to see how conflict can be healthy for teams if managed properly.

Leaders assume mature adults will resolve conflicts on their own. This is not always the case as people involved in conflicts can lack an objective perspective due to charged emotions.

56% of respondents prioritize restoring harmony in conflict and will push own needs aside.
Source: Niagara Institute, 2022

Teams with a shared purpose are more engaged and have higher performance

Increased Engagement

Effective and high-performing teams exchange information freely. They are clear on the purpose and goals of the organization, which enable empowerment.

Info-Tech Insight

Clear decision-making processes allow employees to focus on getting the work done versus navigating the system.

Case Study

Project Aristotle at Google – What makes a team effective at Google?

INDUSTRY: Technology
SOURCE: reWork

Challenge

Google wanted to clearly define what makes a team effective to drive a consistent meaning among its employees. The challenge was to determine more than quantitative measures, because more is not always better as it can just mean more mistakes to fix, and include the qualitative factors that bring some groups of people together better than others.

Solution

There was no pattern in the data it studied so Google stepped back and defined what a team is before embarking on defining effectiveness. There is a clear difference between a work group (a collection of people with little interdependence) and a team that is highly interdependent and relies on each other to share problems and learn from one another. Defining the different meanings took time and Google found that different levels of the organization were defining effectiveness differently.

Results

Google ended up with clear definitions that were co-created by all employees, which helped drive the meaning behind the behaviors. More importantly it was also able to define factors that had no bearing on effectiveness; one of which is very relevant in today's hybrid world – colocation.

It was discovered that teams need to trust, have clarity around goals, have structure, and know the impact their work has.

Overcoming barriers

Teams often lack the skills or knowledge to increase effectiveness and performance.

• Leaders struggle with team strife and ineffectiveness.
• A leader's ability to connect with and engage team members is vital for driving desired outcomes. However, many team leads struggle to deal with low-performing or conflict-ridden teams.
• Without adequate training on providing feedback, coaching, and managing difficult conversations, team leads often do not have the skills to positively affect team performance – and they do not appreciate the impact their actions have on desired outcomes.
• Team leads often find it difficult to invest time and resources in addressing challenges when the team is working toward deadlines.
• Team leads who are new to a management role within the organization often struggle to transition from independent contributor to leader – especially when they are tasked with managing team members who are former peers.
• Some team leads believe that soliciting help will be viewed as a personal failure, so they are reluctant to seek support for team performance management from more-senior leaders.

It's unrealistic to expect struggling teams to improve without outside help; if they were able to, they would have already done so.
To improve, teams require:

• A clearly defined team identity
• A clearly defined decision-making paradigm
• Consistently productive exchanges within the team
• An atmosphere of psychological safety

BUT these are the very things they are lacking when they're struggling.

Improving team effectiveness

Use the Info-Tech IDEA Model to assess and improve your team's effectiveness.

Begin by assessing, recognizing, and addressing challenges in:

• Identity – team goals, roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities
• Decision-making paradigms and processes within the team.
• Exchanges of information, motivation, and emotions between team members
• Atmosphere of team psychological safety

IDEA Model of Team Effectiveness

Effective Team

• Identity
• Decisions
• Exchanges
• Atmosphere

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 6 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

Workshop Overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Phase 1

Assess the team

Improving team effectiveness

Use the Info-Tech IDEA Model to assess and improve your team's effectiveness

Begin by assessing, recognizing, and addressing challenges in:

• Identity – team goals, roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities.
• Decision-making paradigms and processes within the team.
• Exchanges of information, motivation, and emotions between team members.
• Atmosphere of team psychological safety.

Effective Team

• Identity
• Decisions
• Exchanges
• Atmosphere

Assess the shared understanding of team identity

In addition to having a clear understanding of the team's goals and objectives, team members must also:

• Understand their own and each other's roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities.
• Recognize and appreciate the value of each team member.
• Realize how their actions impact each others' work and the overall goals and objectives.
• Understand that working in silos is considered a work group whereas a team coordinates activities, shares information, and supports each other to achieve their goals.

Clear goals enable employees to link their contributions to overall success of the team. Those who feel their contributions are important to the success of the department are two times more likely to feel they are part of a team working toward a shared goal compared to those who don't (McLean & Company, Employee Engagement Survey, IT respondents, 2023; N=4,551).

Goals matter in teamwork

The goals and objectives of the team are the underlying reason for forming the team in the first place. Without a clear and agreed-upon goal, it is difficult for teams to understand the purpose of their work.

Clear goals support creating clear roles and the contributions required for team success.

Assess the shared understanding of decision making

Decision making adds to the complexity of teamwork.
Individual team members hold different information and opinions that need to be shared to make good decisions.
Ambiguous decision-making processes can result in team members being unable to continue their work until they get clear direction.
The most appropriate decision-making process depends on the type of team:

• The higher the degree of interconnectivity in team members' work, the greater the need for a general consensus approach to decision making. However, if you opt for a general consensus approach, a backup decision-making method must be identified in the event consensus cannot be reached.
• High-pressure and high-stakes environments tend to centralize decision making to make important decisions quickly.
• Low-pressure and low-stakes environments are more likely to adopt consensus models.

Ensure team members understand how decisions are made within the team. Ask:

• Do team members recognize the importance of sharing information, opinions, and suggestions?
• Do team members feel their voices are heard?
• Must there be consensus between all team members?
• Is there a single decision maker?

Assess team exchanges by focusing on communication

Evaluate exchanges within your team using two categories:

These categories are related, but there is not always overlap. While some conflicts involve failures to successfully exchange information, conflict can also occur even when everyone is communicating successfully.

Successful exchange behaviors

• Shared understanding of how to motivate one another and how team members respond emotionally.
• Team moving beyond conflict to united action.
• Formalized processes used for resolving conflicts.
• Platforms provided for expressing diverse or conflicting perspectives and opinions – and used in a constructive manner.
• Use of agendas at meetings as well as clearly defined action items that reflect meeting outcomes.
• Avoidance of language that is exclusive, such as jargon and inside jokes.

Exchanges of information, emotion, and motivation

When selecting a method of communication (for example, in-person versus email), consider how that method will impact the exchange of all three aspects – not just information.

Downplaying the importance of emotional and motivational exchanges and focusing solely on information is very risky since emotional and motivational exchanges can impact human relationships and team psychological safety.

• Information: data or opinions.
• Emotions: feelings and evaluations about the data or opinions.
• Motivations: what we feel like doing in response to the data or opinions.

Communication affects the whole team

Effects are not limited to the team members communicating directly:

• How team members interact one on one transmits information and causes emotional and motivational responses in other group members not directly involved.
• How the larger group receives information, emotions, and motivations will also impact how individuals relate to each other in group settings.

Remember to watch the reactions and behavior of participants and observers when assessing how the team behaves.

Managing conflict

Identify how conflict management is embedded into team practices.

• Resolving conflicts is difficult and uses up a lot of time and energy. This is especially true if the team needs to figure out what to do each and every time people disagree.
• Teams that take the time to define conflict resolution processes upfront:
  • Demonstrate their commitment to resolving conflict in a healthy way.
  • Signal that diverse perspectives and opinions are valued, even if they spur disagreement sometimes.
  • Are ready for conflict when it arises – prepared to face it and thrive.

Successfully communicating information, emotions, and motivations is not the same as managing conflict.

Teams that are communicating well are more likely to uncover conflicting perspectives and opinions than teams that are not.

Conflict is healthy and can be an important element of team success if it is managed.

The team should have processes in place to resolve conflicts and move to united action.

Assess the atmosphere

Team psychological safety

A team atmosphere that exists when all members feel confident that team members can do the following without suffering negative interpersonal consequences such as blame, shame, or exclusion:

• Admit mistakes
• Raise questions or concerns
• Express dissenting views

(Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999;
The New York Times, 2016)

What psychologically safe teams look like:

• Open and learning-focused approach to error.
• Effective conflict management within the team.
• Emotional and relational awareness between team members.
• Existence of work-appropriate interpersonal relationships between team members (i.e. beyond mere working relationships).

(Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999;
The New York Times, 2016)

What "team psychological safety" is not:

• A situation where all team members are friends.
  In some cases psychologically safe team atmospheres might be harder to create when team members are friends since they might be more reluctant to challenge or disagree with friends.
• Merely trust. Being able to rely on people to honor their commitments is not the same as feeling comfortable admitting mistakes in front of them or disagreeing with them.

"Psychological safety refers to an individual's perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive… They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea."

– re:Work

Psychological safety

The impact of psychological safety on team effectiveness

Why does an atmosphere of team psychological safety matter?

• Prevents groupthink.
  • People who do not feel safe to hold or express dissenting views gravitate to teams that think like they do, resulting in the well-known dangers of groupthink.
• Encourages contribution and co-operation.
  • One study found that if team psychological safety is present, even people who tend to avoid teamwork will be more likely to contribute in team settings, thereby increasing the diversity of perspectives that can be drawn on (Journal of Organizational Culture, 2016).

Creating psychological safety in a hybrid environment requires a deliberate approach to creating team connectedness.

In the Info-Tech State of Hybrid Work in IT report autonomy and team connectedness present an interesting challenge in that higher levels of autonomy drove higher perceptions of lack of connectedness to the respondent's team. In a hybrid world, this means leaders need to be intentional in creating a safe team dynamic.

47% of employees who experienced more control over their decisions related to where, when, and how they work than before the pandemic are feeling less connected to their teams.
Source: Info-Tech, State of Hybrid Work in IT, 2022

1.1 Prepare to launch the survey

1-2 hours

1. Review and record the objectives and outcomes that support your vision of a high-performing team:
   1. Why is this important to you?
   2. What reactions do you anticipate from the team?
2. In your team meeting, share your vision of what a high-performing team looks like. Engage the team in a discussion:
   1. Ask how they work. Ask them to describe their best working team environment from a previous experience or an aspirational one.
   2. Option: Instruct them to write on sticky notes, one idea per note, and share. This approach will allow for theming of ideas.
3. Introduce the survey as a way, together as a team, the current state can be assessed against the desired state discussed.
   1. Be clear that as the leader, you won't be completing the survey as you don't want to influence their perceptions of the team. As the leader, you hold authority, and therefore, experience the team differently. This is about them and their feedback.

Input

• Observations of team behavior
• Clearly articulated goals for team cohesion

Output

• Speaking notes for introducing survey
• Survey launch

Materials

• Whiteboard/flip charts
• Sticky notes
• IDEA Assessment

Participants

• Leader
• Team Members

Download the IT Team Effectiveness Survey

1.2 Launch the survey

1-2 hours

1. Determine how the survey will be completed.
   1. Paper-based
      1. Email a copy of the Word document IT Team Effectiveness Survey for each person to complete individually.
      2. Identify one person to collect each survey and enter the results into the team effectiveness survey tool (tab 2. Data – Effectiveness Answers and tab 3. Data – Team Type Answers). This must be someone outside the team.
   2. Online direct input into Team Effectiveness Survey Tool
      1. Post the document in a shared folder.
      2. Instruct individuals to select one of the numbered columns and enter their information into tab 2. Data – Effectiveness Answers and tab 3. Data – Team Type Answers.
      3. To protect anonymity and keep results confidential, suggest each person opens document in "Cognito mode."
      4. Hide the Summary and Results tabs to avoid team members previewing them.

Download the IT Team Effectiveness Survey Results Tool

Paper-Based Cautions & Considerations

• Heavily dependent on a trusted third party for genuine results
• Can be time consuming to enter the results

Online Direct Cautions & Considerations

• Ensure that users keep to the same numbered column across both entry tabs
• Seeing other team members' responses may influence others
• Least amount of administration

Phase 2

Review Results and Action Plan

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• Analyzing and debriefing the results to determine themes and patterns to come to a team consensus on what to focus on.
• Facilitated activities to drive awareness, build co-created definitions of what an effective team looks like, and identify solutions the team can undertake to be more effective.

This phase involves the following participants:

• Leader of the team
• All team members

Deliverables:

• A presentation that communicates the team assessment results
• A plan for effectively delivering the assessment results

Phase 2: Build a plan to review results and create an action plan

Reviewing assessment results and creating an improvement action plan is best accomplished through a team meeting.

Analyzing and preparing for the team meeting may be done by:

• The person charged with team effectiveness (i.e. team coach).
• For teams that are seriously struggling with team effectiveness, the coach should complete this step in its entirety.
• The team coach and the team lead.
• Truly effective teams are self-reliant. Begin upskilling team leads by involving team leads from the start.

1. Analyze team assessment results
2. Prepare to communicate results to the team
3. Select team activities that will guide the identification of action items and next steps
4. Facilitate the team meeting

2.1 Analyze results

Health Dials

1. Once the results are final, review the Health Dials for each of the areas.
   1. For each area of the team's effectiveness
      • Red indicates a threat – this will derail the team and you will require an external person to help facilitate conversations.
        It would be recommended to contact us for additional guidance if this is one of your results.
      • Yellow is a growth opportunity.
      • Green is a strength and pay attention to where the dial is – deep into strength or just past the line?
   2. Think about these questions and record your initial reactions.
      1. What surprises you – either positively or negatively?
      2. What areas are as expected?
      3. What behaviors are demonstrated that support the results?

Prioritize one to two factors for improvement by selecting those with:

• The lowest overall score.
• The highest variance in responses.
• If psychological safety is low, be sure to prioritize this factor; it is the foundation of any effective team.

2.2 Analyze results

Alignment of Responses

1. The alignment of responses area provides you with an overview of the range of responses from the team for each area.
   • The more variety in the bars indicates how differently each person is experiencing the team.
   • The more aligned the bars are the more shared the experiences.

The flatter the bars are across the top, the more agreement there was. Factors that show significant differences in opinion should be discussed to diagnose what is causing the misalignment within your team.

2. Recommendation is to look at high scores and the alignment and lower scores and the alignment to determine where you may want to focus.

The alignment chart below shows varied responses; however, there are two distinct patterns. This will be an important area to review.
Things to think about:

• Are there new team members?
• Has there been a leadership change?
• Has there been a change that has impacted the team?

2.3 Analyze results

Team Characteristics and Stakes

1. Team Characteristics. Use the Team Type Results tab in the IT Team Effectiveness Assessment Tool to identify how the team characterizes itself along the High-Low Scale. The closer the dark blue bar is to the right or left suggests to which degree the team views the characteristic.
   1. Interdependence highlights the team's view on how interconnected and dependent they are on each other to get work done. Think of examples where they should be sharing or collaborating, and they are not.
   2. Virtual describes the physicality of the team. This area has changed a lot since 2020; however, it's still important to note if the team shares the same understanding of work location. Are they thinking of team members in a different geography or referring to hybrid work?
   3. Decision making describes the scale of one decision maker or many. Where are most decisions made by on your team or who is making them?
   4. Stability refers to the degree to which the team stays the same – no membership change or turnover. It can be defined by length of time the group has been together. Looking at this will help understand alignment results. If alignment is varied, one might expect a less stable team.
2. Stakes and Pressure
   1. Pressure refers to the conditions in which the team must work. How urgent are requests?
   2. Stakes refers to the degree of impact the work has. Will outputs impact safety, health, or a service?
   3. This category can be reviewed against decision making – high pressure, high stakes environments usually have a high concentration of authority. Low pressure, low stakes decisions can also be made either by one person as there is relatively no impact or with many as you have time to get many perspectives.
   4. This area informs what your decision-making protocols should look like.

2.4 Prepare for meeting

1-2 hours

1. Select a facilitator
   • The right person to facilitate the meeting and present the results is dependent upon the results themselves, the team lead's comfort level, and the root and degree of team dysfunction.
   • Typically, the team lead will facilitate and present the results. However, it will be more appropriate to have a member of the HR team or an external third party facilitate.
2. Set the agenda (recommended sample to the right) that ensures:
   • Team members reflect on the results and discuss reaction to the results. (E.g. Are they surprised? Why/why not?)
   • Results are clearly understood and accepted by team members before moving on to activities.
   • The aim of the meeting is kept in mind. The purpose of the team meeting is to involve all team members in the creation of an effectiveness improvement plan.
3. Customize the Facilitation Guide and activities in the Improve IT Team Effectiveness Facilitation Guide. (Activities are aligned with the four factors in the IDEA model.)
   • Identify a clear objective for each activity given the team assessment results. (E.g. What are the areas of improvement? What is the desired outcome of the activity?)
   • Review and select the activities that will best achieve the objectives.
   • Customize and prepare for chosen activities appropriately.
   • Obtain all necessary materials.
   • Practice by anticipating and preparing for questions, objectives, and what you will say and do.

Facilitation Factors
Select a third-party facilitator if:

• The team lead is uncomfortable.
• The leadership or organization is implicated in the team's dysfunction, a third party can be sought in place of HR.
• Regardless of who facilitates, it is critical that the team lead understands the process and results and is comfortable answering any questions that arise.

Agenda

• Review the IDEA Model.
• Discuss the assessment results.
• Invite team members to reflect on the results and discuss reaction to the results.
• Ensure results are clearly understood and accepted.
• Examine team challenges and strengths through selected team activities.
• Create a team charter and effectiveness improvement plan.

Materials

• IT Team Effectiveness Activities Facilitation Guide
• IT Team Effectiveness Survey results

Participants

• Leader

2.5 Run the meeting

2-3 hours

Facilitate the team meeting and agree on the team effectiveness improvement plan.

Work with the team to brainstorm and agree on an action plan of continuous improvements.

By creating an action plan together with the team, there is greater buy-in and commitment to the activities identified within the action plan.

Don't forget to include timelines and task owners in the action plan – it isn't complete without them.

Document final decisions in Info-Tech's Improve IT Team Effectiveness Action Plan Tool.

Review activity Develop Team Charter in the Improve IT Team Effectiveness Facilitation Guide and conclude the team meeting by creating a team charter. With a team charter, teams can better understand:

• Team objectives
• Team membership and roles
• Team ground rules

Facilitation Factors

Encourage and support participation from everyone.

Be sure no one on the team dismisses anyone's thoughts or opinions – they present the opportunity for further discussion and deeper insight.

Watch out for anything said or done during the activities that should be discussed in the activity debrief.

Debrief after each activity, outlining any lessons learned, action items, and next steps.

Agenda

• Review the IDEA Model.
• Discuss the assessment results.
• Invite team members to reflect on the results and discuss reaction to the results.
• Ensure results are clearly understood and accepted.
• Examine team challenges and strengths through selected team activities.
• Create a team charter and effectiveness improvement plan.

Materials

• IT Team Effectiveness Activities Facilitation Guide
• Whiteboard/flip charts
• Sticky notes
• IT Team Effectiveness Survey results

Participants

• Leader
• Team Members
• Optional – External Facilitator

Phase 3

Document and measure

This phase will walk you through the following activities:
Building your team charter that will include:

• Team vision, mission, and goals
• Roles and responsibilities of each member
• Decision-making responsibilities and process
• How information will be shared and by whom
• Ways to build psychological safety on the team

This phase involves the following participants:

• Leader of the team
• All team members

Document and agree to regular check-ins to reassess.

As a team it will be important to drive your brainstormed solutions into an output that is co-created.

• Agree to what actions can be implemented.
• Capture agreed-to team goals, roles, responsibilities, and decision process into a team charter. Also include your communication protocol that articulates how information will be shared in future.

1. Review suggestions and actions
2. Capture in team charter
3. Assign metrics to measure success and determine when to review
4. Complete ongoing check-ins with team through team meeting and plan to reassess if agreed to

Team Charter

Never assume everyone "just knows."

Set clear expectations for the team's interactions and behaviors.

• Some teams call this a team agreement, team protocol, or ways of working. Determine the naming convention that works best for your team and culture.
• This type of document saw a renewed popularity during COVID-19 as face-to-face interactions were more difficult, and as teams, news ways to work needed to be discovered, shared, and documented.
• A co-created team charter is a critical component to onboarding new employees in the hybrid world.

Info-Tech Insight – State of Hybrid Work in IT

One contributor to the report shared the effort and intention around maintaining their culture during the pandemic. The team agreement created became a critical tool to enable conversations between leaders and their team – it was not a policy document.

Team effectiveness is driven through thoughtful planned conversations. And it's a continued conversation.

Download the IT Team Charter Template

Establish Baseline Metrics

Baseline metrics will be improved through:

Identify the impact that improved team effectiveness will have on the organization.
Determine your baseline metrics to assess the success of your team interventions and demonstrate the impact to the rest of the organization using pre-determined goals and metrics.
Share success stories through:

• Newsletters or email announcements
• Team meetings
• Presentations to business partners or the organization

Reassess team effectiveness

Reassess and identify trends after they have worked on key focus areas for improvement.

Track the team's progress by reassessing their effectiveness six to twelve months after the initial assessment.
Identify if:

• Team characteristics have changed.
• Areas of team strengths are still a source of strength.
• Areas for improvement have, in fact, improved.
• There are opportunities for further improvement.

As the team matures, priorities and areas of concern may shift; it is important to regularly reassess team effectiveness to ensure ongoing alignment and suitability.
Note: It is not always necessary to conduct a full formal assessment; once teams become more effective and self-sufficient, informal check-ins by team leads will be sufficient.

If you assess team effectiveness for multiple teams, you have the opportunity to identify trends:

• Are there common challenges within teams?
• If so, what are they?
• How comfortable are teams with intervention?
• How often is outside help required?

Identifying these trends, initiatives, training, or tactics may be used to improve team effectiveness across the department – or even the organization.

Teams are ultimately accountable for their own effectiveness.

As teams mature, the team lead should become less involved in action planning. However, enabling truly effective teams takes significant time and resources from the team lead.

Use the action plan created and agreed upon during the team meeting to hold teams accountable:

• Ensure teams follow through on action items.
• Ensure you are continuously assessing team effectiveness (formally or informally).

The team coach should have a plan to transition into a supportive role by:

• Providing teams with the knowledge, resources, and tools required to improve and sustain high effectiveness.
• Providing team members and leads with a safe, open, and honest environment.
• Stepping in as an objective third party when required.

If the team continues to face barriers

Other important information: If team effectiveness has not significantly improved, other interventions may be required that are beyond the scope of this project.

The four factors outlined in the IDEA Model of team effectiveness are very important, but they are not the only things that have a positive or negative impact on teams. If attempts to improve the four factors have not resulted in the desired level of team effectiveness, evaluate other barriers:

For organizational culture, ask if performance and reward programs do the following:

• Value teamwork alongside individual achievement and competition
• Provide incentives that promote a focus on individual performance over team performance
• Reward or promote those who sabotage their teams

For learning and development, ask:

• Is team effectiveness included in our manager or leadership training?
• Do we offer resources to employees seeking to improve their teamwork competencies?

If an individual team member's or leader's performance is not meeting expectations, potential remedies include a performance improvement plan, reassignment, and termination of employment.

These kinds of interventions are beyond the control of the team itself. In these cases, we recommend you consult with your HR department; HR professionals can be important advocates because they possess the knowledge, influence, and authority in the company to promote changes that support teamwork.

Related Info-Tech Research

Redesign Your IT Department

• You could have the best IT employees in the world, but if they aren't structured well your organization will still fail in reaching its vision.
• Increase the effectiveness of IT as a function.
• Provide employees with clarity in their roles and responsibilities.

Build an IT Employee Engagement Program

• With the growing IT job market, turnover is a serious threat to IT's ability to deliver seamless value and continuously drive innovation.
• Engagement initiatives are often seen as being HR's responsibility; however, IT leadership needs to take accountability for the retention and productivity of their employees in order to drive business value.

Info-Tech Leadership Programs

• Development of the leadership mind should never stop. This program will help IT leaders continue to craft their leadership competencies to navigate the ever-changing world in which we operate.
• Actively delegate responsibilities and opportunities that engage and develop team members to build on current skills and prepare for the future.

Research Contributors and Experts

Carlene McCubbin
Practice Lead
Info-Tech Research Group

Nick Kozlo
Senior Research Analyst
Info-Tech Research Group

Heather Leier-Murray
Senior Research Analyst
Info-Tech Research Group

Stephen O'Conner
Executive Counselor
Info-Tech Research Group

Jane Kouptsova
Research Director
Info-Tech Research Group

Dr. Julie D. Judd, Ed.D.
Chief Technology Officer
Ventura County Office of Education

Works Cited

Aminov, I., A. DeSmet, and G. Jost. "Decision making in the age of urgency." McKinsey. April 2019. Accessed January 2023.
Duhigg, Charles. "What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team." The New York Times, 25 Feb. 2016. Accessed January 2023.
Edmondson, Amy. "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams." Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 2, June 1999, pp. 350-383.
Gardner, Kate. "Julie Judd – Ventura County Office of Education." Toggle, 12 Sept. 2022. Accessed January 2023.
Google People Operations. "Guide: Understand Team Effectiveness." reWork, n.d. Accessed February 2023.
Harkins, Phil. "10 Leadership Techniques for Building High-Performing Teams." Linkage Inc., 2014. Accessed 10 April 2017.
Heath, C. and D. Heath. Decision: How to make better choices in life and work. Random House, 2013, ISBN 9780307361141.
Hill, Jon. "What is an Information Silo and How Can You Avoid It." Bloomfire, 23 March 2022. Accessed January 2023.
"IT Team Management Software for Enhanced Productivity." Freshworks, n.d. Accessed January 2023.
Jackson, Brian. "2022 Tech Trends." Info-Tech Research Group, 2022. Accessed December 2022.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2011.
Kouptsova, J., and A. Mathieson. "State of Hybrid Work in IT." Info-Tech Research Group, 2023. Accessed January 2023.
Mayfield, Clifton, et al. "Psychological Collectivism and Team Effectiveness: Moderating Effects of Trust and Psychological Safety." Journal of Organizational Culture, Communications and Conflict, vol. 20, no. 1, Jan. 2016, pp. 78-94.
Rock, David. "SCARF: A Brain-Based Model for Collaborating With and Influencing Others." NeuroLeadership Journal, 2008. Web.
"The State of High Performing Teams in Tech Hypercontext." Hypercontext. 2022. Accessed November 2022.
Weick, Carl, and Kathleen Sutcliff. Managing the unexpected. John Wiley & Sons, 2007.
"Workplace Conflict Statistics: How we approach conflict at work." The Niagara Institute, August 2022. Accessed December 2022.

Build a Better Manager

Support IT success with a solid management foundation.

Analyst Perspective

Training that delivers results.

Ninety-eight percent of managers say they need more training, but 93% of managers already receive some level of manager training. Unfortunately, the training typically provided, although copious, is not working. More of the same will never get you better outcomes. How many times have you sat through training that was so long, you had no hope of implementing half of it? How many times have you been taught best practices, with zero guidance on how to apply them? To truly support our managers, we need to rethink manager training. Move from fulfilling an HR mandate to providing truly trainee-centric instruction. Teach only the right skills – no fluff – and encourage and enable their application in the day to day.

Jane Kouptsova Research Director, People & Leadership Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

When it comes to manager training, more is not more. Attending training is not equal to being trained. Even good information is useless when it doesn’t get applied. If your role hasn’t required you to use your training within 48 hours, you were not trained on the most relevant skills.

Effective managers drive effective departments by engaging their teams

Engaged teams are: 52% more willing to innovate* 70% more likely to be at the organization a year from now** 57% more likely to exceed their role’s expectations** Engaged teams are driven by managers: 70% of team-level engagement is accounted for by managers***

*McLean & Company; N=3,395; **McLean & Company; N=5,902; ***Gallup, 2018

Despite the criticality of their role, IT organizations are failing at supporting new managers

87% of middle managers wish they had more training when they were first promoted

98% of managers say they need more training

Source: Grovo, 2016

IT must take notice:

IT as an industry tends to promote staff on the basis of technical skill. As a result, new managers find themselves suddenly out of their comfort zone, tasked with leading teams using management skills they have not been trained in and, more often than not, having to learn on the job. This is further complicated because many new IT managers must go from a position of team member to leader, which can be a very complex transition.

The truth is, many organizations do try and provide some degree of manager training, it just is not effective

*Grovo, 2016; **Chief Executive, 2016

Info-Tech’s Management & Governance Diagnostic, N=337 CIOs

There are three key reasons why manager training fails

1. Information Overload

Seventy-five percent of managers report that their training was too long to remember or to apply in their day to day (Grovo, 2016). Trying to cover too much useful information results in overwhelm and does not deliver on key training objectives.

2. Limited Implementation

Thirty-three percent of managers find that their training had insufficient follow-up to help them apply it on the job (Grovo, 2016). Learning is only the beginning. The real results are obtained when learning is followed by practice, which turns new knowledge into reliable habits.

3. Lack of departmental alignment

Implementing training without a clear link to departmental and organizational objectives leaves you unable to clearly communicate its value, undermines your ability to secure buy-in from attendees and executives, and leaves you unable to verify that the training is actually improving departmental effectiveness.

Overcome those common training pitfalls with tactical solutions

This research combats common training challenges by focusing on building habits, not just learning ideas

Info-Tech Insight

When it comes to manager training, stop thinking about learning, and start thinking about practice. In difficult situations, we fall back on habits, not theoretical knowledge. If a manager is only as good as their habits, we need to support them in translating knowledge into practice.

This research focuses on building good management habits to drive enterprise success

Set up your first-time managers for success by leveraging Info-Tech’s training to focus on three key areas of management:

• Managing people as a team
• Managing people as individuals
• Managing yourself as a developing leader

Each of these areas:

• Is immediately important for a first-time manager
• Includes practical, tactical skills that can be implemented quickly
• Translates to departmental and organizational benefits

Info-Tech Insight

There is no such thing as “effective management training.” Various topics will be effective at different times for different roles. Delivering only the highest-impact learning at strategic points in your leadership development program will ensure the learning is retained and translates to results.

This blueprint covers foundational training in three key domains of effective management

Effective Managers

• Self
  • Conflict & Difficult Conversations
  • Your Role in the Organization
  • Your Role in Decisions
• Team
  • Communication
  • Feedback & Coaching
  • Performance Management
• People
  • Master Time
  • Delegate
  • Accountability

Each topic corresponds to a module, which can be used individually or as a series in any order.

Choose topics that resonate with your managers and relate directly to their day-to-day tasks. Training on topics that may be useful in the future, while interesting, is less likely to generate lasting skill development.

Info-Tech Best Practice

This blueprint is not a replacement for formal leadership or management certification. It is designed as a practical, tactical, and foundational introduction to key management capabilities.

Info-Tech’s training tools guide participants through successful skill building

Measure the effectiveness of your manager training with outcomes-focused metrics

Linking manager training with measurable outcomes allows you to verify that the program is achieving the intended benefits, course correct as needed, and secure buy-in from stakeholders and participants by articulating and documenting value.

Use the metrics suggested below to monitor your training program’s effectiveness at three key stages:

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series

of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 1 to 3 calls over the course of several months, depending on training schedule.

Workshop Overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Pool of topics:

• Master Time
• Accountability
• Your Role in the Organization
• Your Role in Decision Making
• Manage Conflict Constructively
• Effective Communication
• Performance Management
• Coaching & Feedback

Phase 1

Prepare to facilitate training

Outcomes of this phase:

• Training facilitation deck customized to organizational norms
• Training workbook distributed to participants
• Training dates and facilitator finalized

1.1 Select training modules

1-3 hours

1. Review the module descriptions on the following slides.
2. Identify modules that will address managers’ most pressing development needs.
   To help make this decision, consult the following:
   • Trainees’ development plans
   • Trainees’ supervisors

Effective Communication

Effective communication is the cornerstone of good management

Effective communication can make or break your IT team’s effectiveness and engagement and a manager’s reputation in the organization. Effective stakeholder management and communication has a myriad of benefits – yet this is a key area where IT leaders continue to struggle.

There are multiple ways in which you communicate with your staff. The tactics you will learn in this section will help you to:

1. Understand communication styles. Every staff member has a predisposition in terms of how they give, receive, and digest information. To drive effective communication new managers need to understand the profiles of each of their team members and adjust their communicate style to suit.
2. Understand what your team members want communicated to them and how. Communication is highly personal, and a good manager needs to clearly understand what their team wants to be informed about, their desired interactions, and when they need to be involved in decision making. They also must determine the appropriate channels for communication exchanges.
3. Make meetings matter. Many new managers never receive training on what differentiates a good and bad meeting. Effective meetings have a myriad of benefits, but more often than not meetings are ineffective, wasting both the participants’ and organizer’s time. This training will help you to ensure that every team meeting drives a solid outcome and gets results.

Benefits:

• Better buy-in, understanding, and communication.
• Improved IT reputation with the organization.
• Improved team engagement.
• Improved stakeholder satisfaction.
• Better-quality decision making.
• Improved transparency, trust, and credibility.
• Less waste and rework.
• Greater ability to secure support and execute the agenda.
• More effective cooperation on activities, better quality information, and greater value from stakeholder input.
• Better understanding of IT performance and contribution.

Effective Communication

Effective manager communication has a direct impact on employee engagement

35% Of organizations say they have lost an employee due to poor internal communication (project.co, 2021).

59% Of business leaders lose work time to mistakes caused by poor communication (Grammarly, 2022).

$1.2 trillion Lost to US organizations as a result of poor communication (Grammarly, 2022).

Effective Communication

Effective communication is crucial to all parts of the business

Effective Communication

The Communicate Effectively Facilitation Guide covers the following topics:

• Understand Communication Styles
• Tailor Communication Methods to Activities
• Make Meetings Matter

Learning outcomes:

Main goal: Become a better communicator across a variety of personal styles and work contexts.

Key objectives:

• Reaffirm why effective communication matters.
• Work with people with different communication styles.
• Communicate clearly and effectively within a team.
• Make meetings more effective.

Info-Tech Insight

First-time IT managers face specific communication challenges that come with managing people for the first time: learning to communicate a greater variety of information to different kinds of people, in a variety of venues. Tailored training in these areas helps managers focus and fast-track critical skill development.

Performance Management

Meaningful performance measures drive employee engagement, which in turn drives business success

Meaningful performance measures help employees understand the rationale behind business decisions, help managers guide their staff, and clarify expectations for employees. These factors are all strong predictors of team engagement:

Performance Management

Clear performance measures benefit employees and the organization

Performance Management

The Performance Management Facilitation Guide covers the following topics:

• Develop Meaningful Goals
• Set Meaningful Metrics

Learning outcomes:

Main goal: Become proficient in setting, tracking, and communicating around performance management goals.

Key objectives:

• Understand the role of managers and employees in the performance management process.
• Learn to set SMART, business-aligned goals for your team.
• Learn to help employees set useful individual goals.
• Learn to set meaningful, holistic metrics to track goal progression.
• Understand the relationship between goals, metrics, and feedback.

Info-Tech Insight

Goal and metric development holds special significance for first-time IT managers because it now impacts not only their personal performance, but that of their employees and their team collectively. Training on these topics with a practical team- and employee-development approach is a focused way to build these skills.

Coaching & Feedback

Coaching and feedback are effective methods to influence employees and drive business outcomes

1. Administrative Sciences, 2022

2. International Review of Management and Marketing, 2020

3. Current Psychology, 2021

4. Quantum Workplace, 2021

5. Issues and Perspectives in Business and Social Sciences, 2022

6. Sustainability, 2021

Coaching & Feedback

The Coaching & Feedback Facilitation Guide covers the following topics:

• The 4 A’s of Coaching
• Effective Feedback

Learning outcomes:

Main goal: Get prepared to coach and offer feedback to your staff as appropriate.

Key objectives:

• Understand the difference between coaching and feedback and when to apply each one.
• Learn the importance of a coaching mindset.
• Learn effective coaching via the 4 A’s framework.
• Understand the actions that make up feedback and the factors that make it successful.
• Learn to deal with resistance to feedback.

Info-Tech Insight

First-time managers often shy away from giving coaching and feedback, stalling their team’s performance. A focused and practical approach to building these skills equips new managers with the tools and confidence to tackle these challenges as soon as they arise.

Your Role in the Organization

IT managers who understand the business context provide more value to the organization

Managers who don’t understand the business cannot effect positive change. The greater understanding that IT managers have of business context, the more value they provide to the organization as seen by the positive relationship between IT’s understanding of business needs and the business’ perception of IT value.

Source: Info-Tech Research Group

Your Role in the Organization

Knowing your stakeholders is key to understanding your role in the business and providing value to the organization

To understand your role in the business, you need to know who your stakeholders are and what value you and your team provide to the organization. Knowing how you help each stakeholder meet their wants needs and goals means that you have the know-how to balance experience and outcome-based behaviors. This is the key to being an attentive leader.

The tactics you will learn in this section will help you to:

1. Know your stakeholders. There are five key stakeholders the majority of IT managers have: management, peers, direct reports, internal users, and external users or customers. Managers need to understand the goals, needs, and wants of each of these groups to successfully provide value to the organization.
2. Understand the value you provide to each stakeholder. Stakeholder relationship management requires IT managers to exhibit drive and support behaviors based on the situation. By knowing how you drive and support each stakeholder, you understand how you provide value to the organization and support its mission, vision, and values.
3. Communicate the value your team provides to the organization to your team. Employees need to understand the impact of their work. As an IT manager, you are responsible for communicating how your team provides value to the organization. Mission statements on how you provide value to each stakeholder is an easy way to clearly communicate purpose to your team.

Benefits:

• Faster and higher growth.
• Improved team engagement.
• Improved stakeholder satisfaction.
• Better quality decision making.
• More innovation and motivation to complete goals and tasks.
• Greater ability to secure support and execute on goals and tasks.
• More effective cooperation on activities, better quality information, and greater value from stakeholder input.
• Better understanding of IT performance and contribution.

Your Role in the Organization

The Your Role in the Organization Facilitation Guide covers the following topics:

• Know Your Stakeholders
• Understand the Value You Provide to the Organization
• Develop Learnings Into Habits

Learning outcomes:

Main goal: Understand how your role and the role of your team serves the business.

Key objectives:

• Learn who your stakeholders are.
• Understand how you drive and support different stakeholder relationships.
• Relate your team’s tasks back to the mission, vision, and values of the organization.
• Create a mission statement for each stakeholder to bring back to your team.

Info-Tech Insight

Before training first-time IT managers, take some time as the facilitator to review how you will serve the wants and needs of those you are training and your stakeholders in the organization.

Decision Making

Bad decisions have tangible costs, so managers must be trained in how to make effective decisions

To understand your role in the decision-making process, you need to know what is expected of you and you must understand what goes into making a good decision. The majority of managers report they have no trouble making decisions and that they are good decision makers, but the statistics say otherwise. This ease at decision making is due to being overly confident in their expertise and an inability to recognize their own ignorance.1

The tactics you will learn in this section will help you to:

1. Effectively communicate decisions. Often, first-time managers are either sharing their decision recommendations with their manager or they are communicating a decision down to their team. Managers need to understand how to have these conversations so their recommendations provide value to management and top-down decisions are successfully implemented.
2. Provide valuable feedback on decisions. Evaluating decisions is just as critical as making decisions. If decisions aren’t reviewed, there is no data or feedback to discover why a decision was a success or failure. Having a plan in place before the decision is made facilitates the decision review process and makes it easier to provide valuable feedback.
3. Avoid common decision-making mistakes. Heuristics and bias are common decision pitfalls even senior leaders are susceptible to. By learning what the common decision-making mistakes are and being able to recognize them when they appear in their decision-making process, first-time managers can improve their decision-making ability.

20% Of respondents say their organizations excel at decision making (McKinsey, 2018).

87% “Diverse teams are 87% better at making decisions” (Upskillist, 2022).

86% of employees in leadership positions blame the lack of collaboration as the top reason for workplace failures (Upskillist, 2022).

Decision Making

A decision-making process is imperative, even though most managers don’t have a formal one

1. Identify the Problem and Define Objectives
2. Establish Decision Criteria
3. Generate and Evaluate Alternatives
4. Select an Alternative and Implement
5. Evaluate the Decision

Managers tend to rely on their own intuition which is often colored by heuristics and biases. By using a formal decision-making process, these pitfalls of intuition can be mitigated or avoided. This leads to better decisions.

First-time managers are able to apply this framework when making decision recommendations to management to increase their likelihood of success, and having a process will improve their decisions throughout their career and the financial returns correlated with them.

Decision Making

Recognizing personal heuristics and bias in the decision-making process improves more than just decision results

Employees are able to recognize bias in the workplace, even when management can’t. This affects everything from how involved they are in the decision-making process to their level of effort and productivity in implementing decisions. Without employee support, even good decisions are less likely to have positive results. Employees who perceive bias:

Decision Making

The Decision Making Facilitation Guide covers the following topics:

• Effectively Communicate Decisions
• Provide Valuable Feedback on Decisions
• Avoid Common Decision-Making Mistakes

Learning outcomes:

Main goal: Understand how to successfully perform your role in the decision process.

Key objectives:

• Understand the decision-making process and how to assess decisions.
• Learn how to communicate with your manager regarding your decision recommendations.
• Learn how to effectively communicate decisions to your team.
• Understand how to avoid common decision-making errors.

Info-Tech Insight

Before training a decision-making framework, ensure it is in alignment with how decisions are made in your organization. Alternatively, make sure leadership is on board with making a change.

Manage Conflict Constructively

Enable leaders to resolve conflicts while minimizing costs

If you are successful in your talent acquisition, you likely have a variety of personalities and diverse individuals within your IT organization and in the business, which means that conflict is inevitable. However, conflict does not have to be negative – it can take on many forms. The presence of conflict in an organization can actually be a very positive thing: the ability to freely express opinions and openly debate can lead to better, more strategic decisions being made.

The effect that the conflict is having on individuals and the work environment will determine whether the conflict is positive or counterproductive.

As a new manager you need to know how to manage potential negative outcomes of conflict by managing difficult conversations and understanding how to respond to conflict in the workplace.

The tactics you will learn in this section will help you to:

1. Apply strategies to prepare for and navigate through difficult conversations.
2. Expand your comfort level when handling conflict, and engage in constructive conflict resolution approaches.

Benefits:

• Relieve stress for yourself and your co-workers.
• Save yourself time and energy.
• Positively impact relationships with your employees.
• Improve your team dynamic.
• Remove roadblocks to your work and get things done.
• Save the organization money.
• Improve performance.
• Prevent negative issues from reoccurring.

Manage Conflict Constructively

Addressing difficult conversations is beneficial to you, your people, and the organization

When you face a difficult conversation you…

• Relieve stress on you and your co-workers.
• Save yourself time and energy.
• Positively impact relationships with your employees.
• Improve your team dynamic.
• Remove roadblocks to your work
• Save the organization money.
• Improve performance.
• Prevent negative issues from reoccurring.

40% Of employees who experience conflict report being less motivated as a result (Acas, 2021).

30.6% Of employees report coming off as aggressive when trying to resolve a conflict
(Niagara Institute, 2022).

Manage Conflict Constructively

The Manage Conflict Constructively Facilitation Guide covers the following topics:

• Know Your Ideal Time Mix
• Calendar Diligence
• Effective Delegation
• Limit Interruptions

Learning outcomes:

Main goal: Effectively manage your time and know which tasks are your priority and which tasks to delegate.

Key objectives:

• Understand common reasons for difficult conversations.
• Learn Info-Tech’s six-step process to best to prepare for difficult conversations.
• Follow best practices to approach difficult conversations.
• Learn the five approaches to conflict management.
• Practice conflict management skills.

Info-Tech Insight

Conflict does not have to be negative. The presence of conflict in an organization can actually be a very positive thing: the ability to freely express opinions and openly debate can lead to better, more strategic decisions being made.

Master Time

Effective leaders spend their time in specific ways

Source: Info-Tech, N=85

Master Time

Signs you struggle with time management

Master Time

The Master Time Facilitation Guide covers the following topics:

• Understand Communication Styles
• Tailor Communication Methods to Activities
• Make Meetings Matter

Learning outcomes:

Main goal: Become a better communicator across a variety of personal styles and work contexts.

Key objectives:

• Understand how you spend your time.
• Learn how to use your calendar effectively.
• Understand the actions to take to successfully delegate.
• Learn how to successfully limit interruptions.

Info-Tech Insight

There is a right and wrong way to manage your calendar as a first-time manager and it has nothing to do with your personal preference.

Accountability

Accountability creates organizational and team benefits

Source: Forbes, 2019

Accountability

Accountability increases employee empowerment

Employee empowerment is the number one driver of employee engagement. The extent to which you can hold employees accountable for their own actions and decisions is closely related to how empowered they are and how empowered they feel; accountability and empowerment go hand in hand. To feel empowered, employees must understand what is expected of them, have input into decisions that affect their work, and have the tools they need to demonstrate their talents.

Source: McLean & Company Engagement Database, 2018; N=71,794

Accountability

The Accountability Facilitation Guide covers the following topics:

• Create Clarity and Transparency
• Articulate Expectations and Evaluation
• Help Your Team Remove Roadblocks
• Clearly Introduce Accountability to Your Team

Learning outcomes:

Main goal: Create a personal accountability plan and learn how to hold yourself and your team accountable.

Key objectives:

• Understand why accountability matters.
• Learn how to create clarity and transparency.
• Understand how to successfully hold people accountable through clearly articulating expectations and evaluation.
• Know how to remove roadblocks to accountability for your team.

Info-Tech Insight

Accountability is about focusing on the results of a task, rather than just completing the task. Create team accountability by keeping the team focused on the result and not “doing their jobs.” First-time managers need to clearly communicate expectations and evaluation to successfully develop team accountability.

Use the Build a Better Manager Participant Workbooks to help participants set accountabilities and track their progress

A key feature of this blueprint is built-in guidance on transferring your managers’ new knowledge into practical skills and habits they can fall back on when their job requires it.

The Participant Workbooks, one for each module, are structured around the three key principles of learning transfer to help participants optimally structure their own learning:

• Track your learning. This section guides participants through conducting self-assessments, setting learning goals, recording key insights, and brainstorming relapse-prevention strategies
• Establish your personal commitment. This section helps participants record the actions they personally commit to taking to continually practice their new skills
• Secure organizational support. This section guides participants in recording the steps they will take to seek out support from their supervisor and peers.

Info-Tech Insight

Participants should use this workbook throughout their training and continue to review it for at least three months after. Practical skills take an extended amount of time to solidify, and using the workbook for several months will ensure that participants stay on track with regular practice and check-ins.

Set your trainees up for success by reviewing these training best practices

Info-Tech Insight

Participants should use this workbook throughout their training and continue to review it for at least three months after. Practical skills take an extended amount of time to solidify, and using the workbook for several months will ensure that participants stay on track with regular practice and check-ins.

1.2 Customize the facilitation guides

1-3 hours

Prior to facilitating your first session, ensure you complete the following steps:

1. Read through all the module content, including the speaker’s notes, to familiarize yourself with the material and ensure the tactics presented align with your department’s culture and established best practices.
2. Customize the slides with a pencil icon with information relevant to your organization.
3. Ensure you are comfortable with all material to be presented and are prepared to answer questions. If you require clarification on any of the material, book a call with your Info-Tech analyst for guidance.
4. Ensure you do not delete or heavily customize the self-assessment activities and the activities in the Review and Action Plan section of the module. These activities are structured around a skill building framework and designed to aid your trainees in applying their new knowledge in their day to day. If you have any concerns about activities in these sections, book a call with your Info-Tech analyst for guidance.

1.3 Prepare to deliver training

1-3 hours

Complete these steps in preparation for delivering the training to your first-time managers:

1. Select a facilitator.
   • The right person to facilitate the meeting depends on the dynamics within your department. Having a senior IT leader can lend additional weight to the training best practices but may not be feasible in a large department. In these cases, an HR partner or external third party can be asked to facilitate.
2. Distribute the workbooks to attendees before the first training session.
   • Change the header on the workbook templates to your own organization’s, if desired.
   • Email the workbooks to attendees prior to the first session. There is no pre-work to be completed.

Phase 2

Deliver training

Outcomes of this phase:

• Training delivered
• Development goals set by attendees
• Action plan created by attendees

2.1 Deliver training

3 hours

When you are ready, deliver the training. Ensure you complete all activities and that participants record the outcomes in their workbooks.

Tips for activity facilitation:

• Encourage and support participation from everyone. And be sure no one on the team dismisses anyone’s thoughts or opinions – they present the opportunity for further discussion and deeper insight.
• Debrief after each activity, outlining any lessons learned, action items, and next steps.
• Encourage participants to record all outcomes, key insights, and action plans in their workbooks.

Phase 3

Enable long-term skill development

Outcomes of this phase:

• Attendees reminded of action plan and personal commitment
• Supervisors reminded of the need to support trainees' development

3.1 Email trainees with action steps

0.5 hours

After the training, send an email to attendees thanking them for participating and summarizing key next steps for the group. Use the template below, or write your own:

“Hi team,

I want to thank you personally for attending the Communicate Effectively training module. Our group led some great discussion.

A reminder that the next time you will reconvene as a group will be on [Date] to discuss your progress and challenges to date.

Additionally, your manager is aware and supportive of the training program, so be sure to follow through on the commitments you’ve made to secure the support you need from them to build your new skills.

I am always open for questions if you run into any challenges.

Regards,

[Your name]”

3.2 Secure support from trainees’ supervisors

0.5 hours

An important part of the training is securing organizational support, which includes support from your trainees’ supervisors. After the trainees have committed to some action items to seek support from their supervisors, it is important to express your support for this and remind the supervisors of their role in guiding your first-time managers. Use the template below, or write your own, to remind your trainees’ supervisors of this at the end of training (if you are going through all three modules in a short period of time, you may want to wait until the end of the entire training to send this email):

“Hi team,

We have just completed Info-Tech’s first-time manager training with our new manager team. The trainees will be seeking your support in developing their new skills. This could be in the form of coaching, feedback on their progress, reviewing their development plan, etc.

Supervisor support is a crucial component of skill building, so I hope I can count on all of you to support our new managers in their learning. If you are not sure how to handle these requests, or would like a refresher of the material our trainees covered, please let me know.

I am always open for questions if you run into any challenges.

Regards,

[Your name]”

Contributors

Brad Armstrong, Senior Engineering Manager, Code42 Software I am a pragmatic engineering leader with a deep technical background, now focused on building great teams. I'm energized by difficult, high-impact problems at scale and with the cloud technologies and emerging architectures that we can use to solve them. But it's the power of people and organizations that ultimately lead to our success, and the complex challenge of bringing all that together is the work I find most rewarding.

We thank the expert contributors who chose to keep their contributions anonymous.

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