Mike Hanes“The” Mike Hanes

Are you wasting your IT Application Support budget?

The concept of Lean is based on eliminating waste from a process. Application Maintenance and Support is one of the largest IT costs for an enterprise. Waste from a large project can have significant short-term impacts. Waste in the Application Support area can far exceed project waste because of the long-term nature of support.

What is Application Maintenance and Support? If you are typical, you have Application Maintenance and Support teams consisting of a fixed number of resources deployed to provide following types of services:

1. Resolution of Incidents and Problems

2. Consultation Services – Answer questions about the operation of the system and provide planning services to customer

3. Scheduled services such as planned enhancements to add capabilities or provide custom one-time access to information

Do you have the right number of people assigned to the support team? How well do you handle spikes in support requirements? Are the support services beneficial or are they simply “busy work” to occupy a fixed team of resources? Are the supported applications providing value to the business?

Most of support activities are short in duration and require detailed knowledge of the system or time-consuming analysis and research. In order to avoid the time-consuming analysis, support teams are typically staffed with knowledgeable experts. It takes so long for a person to learn the application, organizations resist transferring staff which limits staffing flexibility, adds costs, and increases waste.

Support teams are staffed to handle spikes in problems that may occur during peak periods. A spike in enhancement requests may lead to a growing backlog because of the difficulty in orienting staff. A lull in priority work may leave the team under-utilized.

Most support teams encounter the following challenges:

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Mike Hanes
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Having the guts to go out and make decisions will enhance your career.

Back in December of last year I wrote how “Decision Making is Essential to Good Project Management.” I found that there are many articles already written on how to go about making decisions. One of the best of have read was pointed out in Preetham Nadig’s response to my blog last December. You can read that article, “The case for behavioral strategy” on the McKenzie Quarterly web site. Throughout my career I have been frustrated by slow decision making on my projects. Today I would like to elaborate more on the authority of project managers to make decisions.

Many experts on leadership point out that the worst decision is the decision not to make a decision. You can find this phrased in many different ways but the meaning is the same. What many people don’t realize is that avoiding a decision is a decision in itself. The ramifications of avoiding or delaying a decision must be analyzed against actually making a decision. In my previous blog I emphasized some of the problems that can occur if decisions are not made in a timely manner.

The lack of a decision can be quite detrimental to any project. To be successful, projects must continuously make forward progress. Since the project manager’s performance is measured by the success of their project(s) it is of utmost importance that project managers ensure that decisions are made effectively.

There are two categories of decisions that I will define here. The first is a decision that is out of the project manager’s control and the second is a decision that is within the project manager’s control. Yes, there is a lot of gray area in between and being able to decipher who has the authority to make decisions is not easy.

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Mike Hanes
ProVisionTech

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Dallas IT Recruiter Guy

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A recruiting manager with an IT staffing firm warns IT professionals to use the resume advice they get from the local employment office, outplacement firms and professional resume writers at their own risk.

CIO — Recruiters, professional resume writers and other career experts give out tons of advice on how best to write a resume that will stand out from the competition. Their intentions are noble—they want to help people land jobs—but the problem with their advice is that it doesn’t always apply to IT professionals and the nature of the work they do, says Shana Westerman, a recruiting manager with IT staffing firm Sapphire Technologies.

"People go to the unemployment office or they go to outplacement resume writers who don’t give advice that is applicable to the IT field," she says.

Westerman notes that IT resumes are different from resumes for professionals in other fields because IT workers have to capture a range of skills—both technical and functional—on their resumes. Because technology changes so rapidly and because so much IT work is project-based and involves "so many moving parts," generic resume writing advice can do a great disservice to IT professionals, says Westerman.

Westerman sees first-hand how generic resume writing tips play out on IT professionals’ resumes. She screens, on average, 300 resumes per day searching for IT workers to place with her clients, who are IT line managers and executives at large and midsize companies looking for contract and permanent employees. Westerman says many of the IT resumes she gets from job seekers are too short on specifics for her and her clients’ needs. When she finds a candidate whom she thinks would be a good match for a client, she says she often has to ask the candidate to beef up his resume with more information about his skills and experience.

"You’re not going to meet with a [hiring] manager if your resume doesn’t get you the meeting. Your resume is the one and only tool that gets you an interview," says Westerman.

She adds that even when she advocates for a particular candidate, the client still wants to see on the candidate’s resume all of the capabilities she’s mentioned. "If they don’t see what I say on the candidate’s resume, their interest will wane," Westerman notes.

Here, she shares the generic resume advice IT professionals should run from.

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Mike Hanes
ProVisionTech

ProVisionTech Jobs – Dallas IT Jobs – Dallas Technical Jobs

Dallas IT Recruiter Guy

Integrity in Recruiting
972-200-7171
        

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Job seekers with robust LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles have better access to job opportunities at growing companies than candidates whose job searches don’t include active social networking profiles, according to the results of a new survey.

CIO — Jobvite, a maker of recruiting software, released the results of its third-annual social recruiting survey this morning, and the findings underscore the many reasons job seekers need to incorporate online social networking into their job searches.

Jobvite asked 825 HR and recruiting professionals about the extent to which they use social networking websites in their recruiting process to find and vet candidates for jobs. Their answers indicate that they view social networks as a viable channel for sourcing high-quality candidates and that they plan to increase their use of social networking websites in their recruiting efforts this year. (Only about 3 percent of survey respondents were Jobvite customers.)

At some companies, in fact, social recruiting is beginning to eclipse traditional channels for sourcing candidates, such as job boards and third-party recruiters and search firms.

If you’re looking for a job and not active on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter (the three social networking websites most popular with employers, according to the survey), here are four reasons to join these sites and actively manage your profiles.

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Regards,

Mike Hanes
ProVisionTech

ProVisionTech Jobs – Dallas IT Jobs – Dallas Technical Jobs

Dallas IT Recruiter Guy

Integrity in Recruiting
972-200-7171
        

    "Save Time, The Best Resources, Guaranteed!"

Posted via email from ptg’s posterous