5 Things IT department can do During Tough Times

Towards the end of the fiscal year, IT department are usually using up all the budget they have for the current fiscal year and at the same time the IT head is writing down tens of pages of IT proposals which include plans, roadmap, budget required, improvements to be implemented, purchases to be made, raise in IT staff salary and so many things.

When the economy is good and the company is doing well, the head of the I.T. department wouldn’t have problems convincing the decision makers to approve of the budget requested. But during tough times, these proposals are usually shelved and the I.T. department are working against limited budget. When this happens, the IT head should find ways to motivate their people, remain productive and deliver results despite not opening their pockets.

The following items are things that the IT head can do to produce results:

1. Enhancement of applications – do you still remember the time when you were pressed for the deadline and developers were pushing codes to make it work regardless of standards, design etc. These items are called workarounds and when you don’t have a major release, work on these weak codes and improve on them.

2. Revisit standards – when your team is packed with deliverables and major releases, your team sometimes go into a repetitive process and standards are no longer visited or improved upon. Looking back at the standards you have and the things you can improve on it based on previous releases could do you well in the future.

3. Get those trainings – when I was not yet deployed to a project I attended all the trainings the company offered but when deployment came and major release is on its way, I sometimes find myself not able to attend training for the rest of the year. Use your time and plan on getting those trainings during downtime.

4. Network, network – Get your people to network around the company, create a team that would look into evaluating processes. During these time IT resources can move around the company networking to various business processes and see where improvements can be brought on.

5. Move around roles – since you are not likely to be packed on deliverables, moving roles around the IT resources would help build your business continuity plan as resources would be multi-skilled.

The items above are things that IT department usually neglect when budget is good and projects drain up the time and resources of everyone in the team. During downtime, a lot of things can be done to bring productivity and improve your team.

Image from here.