| | December 20159UTLOOK Healthcare Tech HTMaybe you have a number of mavericks on your team who prefer to not schedule or plan any activities. Perhaps you stack maintenance events on top of one another because "that's what has to happen". Rushing through the work will only set the expectation with others that you are only productive if you are hurried.Take a 30 minute walk and try to ask yourself why it is the way it is. There is always a reason, if you ask yourself enough probing questions. I have seen customers pressure service folks to the breaking point, constantly pushing and pushing all the while jumping on every single detail that is not exactly right. After scratching at the root of this issue for a number of days it occurred to me that the customer had simply lost faith in the provider's ability to deliver what they said they would, when they said they would and by what means. Once the root issue of lack of trust was put onto the table the entire conversation changed and processes and methods were put into place to ensure that the customer's expectations were met. Trust was rebuilt and stress began to dissipate.Without slowing down to try and identify the root cause of this busy, stressed behavior, the team would have continued to drive themselves and the customer crazy. With trust re-established and the pace slowed a tad, both the provider and the customer accelerated their relationship and their respective businesses.Accommodate Everyone, SelectivelyEvery IT department feels pressured to accommodate every single request made of them and to master every technology the business asks them to manage. The result is an over-worked team that is mediocre in all aspects of the job, excelling at only a portion of the overall responsibilities.Again, take a 30min walk (several walks, actually) and begin asking yourself which activities are the absolute most important to the success of the business that are currently performed today in your IT department. It will be a short list, shorter than you think. It will be in the form of something like this:· Ensure my users are productive at all times.· Ensure my business's customers' expectations are met or exceeded.· Ensure that information moves across the enterprise with no restrictions while ensuring security.Once you have whittled the expectation list down to a respectable number of items create a second list of all items that are performed by your team. That list will be excruciatingly long and will include everything from laptop provisioning to telephone support to upgrading SAP. Sort that list in order of your team's honest ability to perform the work to the expectation of the business and be honest in your grading.With that second list completed, begin looking for arrangements to augment your staff, starting with those that your team performs least well. Select managed service partners that perform a select operation better than your team could every possibly perform it in-house. Unlike outsourcing, this is strategic partnering. We are in the days of the service economy and IT is a service to the business. There is strength in numbers and selecting the right partners for the right services will result in a significantly stronger IT department. The IT department can be a village of services. IT does not have to be all things to all people, which only guarantees mediocre support for everything.These two contradictions, "Slow Down to Speed Up" and "Accommodate Everyone, Selectively" are in my mind every single day. They challenge me to get better every single day and have worked for me. I hope that they work for you. For a little motivation, I located a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, which seems fitting:"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function"
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