Banishing the Heroes from Your IT Kingdom - an ITSM Fairy Tale
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Heroes can be dangerous to any organisation, they need to be managed and encouraged to share their wisdom so that you can create a culture where the whole team becomes the hero, rather than the individual
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Banishing the Heroes from Your IT Kingdom - an ITSM Fairy Tale
- 1. Banishing the Heroes from Your IT Kingdom Kirstie Magowan
- 2. Banishing the Heroes from your Kingdom An ITSM Fairy Tale
- 3. The Fairy Tale Begins…
- 4. Who is in YOUR Mirror?
- 5. It’s nice to be appreciated!
- 8. Heroism has its risks
- 9. Get a life!
- 10. Be a superhero to your family!
- 11. A Critical Business Risk
- 12. Knowledge is the key to the kingdom
- 13. Stop rewarding your heroes
- 14. A Hero in recovery
- 15. No time to document…
- 16. Lesson Learned
- 17. Batman needs his Robin!
- 18. Ensure there is a back-up
- 22. No options left
- 24. Softly, Softly catchee Monkey!
- 25. A, fortunately, rarer beast…
- 26. Data should tell the story
- 27. Are You a Hero?
- 28. Race to the Rescue?
- 29. Talk them through the issue?
- 30. Not Worry at All?
- 31. Superhero?
- 32. Just your average hero?
- 33. Or a REAL Hero?
- 38. 1.How important it is 2.How difficult it is
- 39. Don’t do KM by stealth Flying under the radar will not work!
- 40. A tool is not the only answer Don’t forget your people!
- 41. No gain without some pain Communicate the reasons for the change to IT and to the business…there may some short term pain while existing knowledge is recorded
- 42. Metrics matter Measure your progress and feed this back to the business and your IT team
- 43. Talk, talk and talk some more Don’t neglect or underestimate the importance of the people side of the change
- 44. Make sure the importance of KM is understood
- 45. Evolving in the wrong direction
- 46. Your reputation is at stake
- 47. The mandatory Pie chart…
- 48. I had to do it….
- 51. Thank you for attending this session. Don’t forget to complete an evaluation form!
Editor's Notes
- We all know how the story goes...the fair maiden has been captured by the nasty ogre and imprisoned in a high tower in the middle of a dense jungle of unforgiving thorns. Only the bravest knight in the land can rescue her. He gallops in on his trusty steed, slashes the thorns with his shining sword, defeats the ogre with a single blow, scales the high tower and rescues the fair maiden. The kingdom rejoices, he is surely the only hero they will ever need, whenever they are in peril they simply call his name and their world will be right once more.
- Have you ever met this gallant knight...perhaps you see him when you look in the mirror each morning!
- The IT industry abounds with such heroes...don't you love the feeling when you save the day and the subjects of the kingdom (you might know them as customers and users) worship at you feet?
- Sorry to break it to you, but as nice as that feeling is, this is a BAD thing! An environment that encourages heroes is an environment where information silos abound and knowledge management is a foreign language.
- Being the hero can be intoxicating and that feeling is rather addictive! It feels so good to be needed...I talked to a database administrator one day who quite openly told me that he didn't document what he did to resolve calls, because if he did then he became replaceable, as long as he held all the knowledge between his ears his job was safe...he never considered the fact that he also couldn't be promoted. I caught up with him for a coffee last year and he was bemoaning the fact that he was still on the same pay grade and doing the same job eight years later…simple reason for that is that he was very successful at doing exactly what he had been trying to do…he had made himself totally irreplaceable in his role and therefore could not be promoted as there was no-one to take his place.
- A group of us got together last October to commiserate with him when he was made redundant…a new IT manager had come in, immediately identified the app and its support as an unacceptable risk and took the option of replacing the database with a new solution and because my friend had no experience with supporting the other business apps he had made himself unemployable…six months later he is a house-husband (not that this is a bad thing) and he has applied for countless positions with no success as his recent work experience is so focused on a single application.
- Heroes cost the business, and those costs can be high. If the only person who knows how to resolve a recurring issue is away, what do you do? Call them in from holiday (and possibly have to pay penalty rates to get him there)? Get a third party specialist to come in and work out what has gone wrong ( and you know how much they are going to charge)? Get someone else in your team to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel? None of these are satisfactory scenarios, and all are going to cost...the first option simply reinforces the hero complex - "they just can't do without me!"
- So how do you banish all the heroic knights from your kingdom? Very simply, get serious about knowledge management. If everybody either knows, or can find out, how to get things working again, then there is no place for the knight in shining armour.
- It is very easy for a manager to ignore the hero problem…after all the job is being done, and usually very well. The business loves the hero because they know that they can rely on them to fix their issues and this hero-worship serves to reinforce the behavior.
- I am a recovering hero! Several years ago I was a service desk manager, and even though this should have been enough I became the application expert for the key application in the business. I was the only person who knew how to fix the myriad of issues that the software was plagued with. I was at work at 7am every morning to double check that everything was working and was often still there at 8 or 9 pm sorting out issues. I would come in at the weekend if I was called and, to be perfectly honest, martyred myself to keep the system up and running.
- I didn’t document well, and I told myself that this was because I didn’t have time…we had a culture of firefighting and the idea of spending even more time at work to document the solutions really didn’t appeal to me at the time.
- So what made me realize the folly of my ways? A promotion came up in the organization and I applied for it…I was told that they could not give me the job because there was no-one who could take over my application support role. I would like to say that this was my turning point and I started to document my fixes and share the knowledge, but in truth that was not what happened. What actually occurred was that I resigned and took up another role with another employer. There were no winners in this situation, I lost because I left a job I had actually enjoyed and should have had great prospects for advancement, and my employer lost because a huge amount of knowledge walked out the door with me. I was briefly pretty pleased when I found out that my previous employer had found it necessary to replace me with three separate people…then the realization dawned on me that I had been really stupid. All that being a hero had done for me was to almost cause me to burn out, resent my employer and feel used. Yes, I had been used, but I had allowed that to happen, in reality I had encouraged it. That has never happened again…I now document, Document and document again!
- I am working currently with another hero, she is fantastic at her job, but she is going to burn out very soon if we cannot turn things around and find a Robin for her Batman…every hero needs at least one backup! As a project manager in this instance this is the number 1 risk I have identified to my steering group and it is where my efforts are directed currently…it did however take a bit of convincing that this was our biggest risk area, but I have now managed to get that over the line.
- We have started the process of creating a knowledgebase for the system, and our hero is designing a training programme for her new backup, involving her in that process has ensured that she is not feeling threatened or sidelined by having another application specialist working alongside her…the bonus for her is that she is now going to be able to use the huge amount of annual leave that she has accrued over the past few years.
- If you are working somewhere that heroes abound then you have to understand that the business has allowed the hero culture to grow over a period of time, and it is going to be no easy matter to change that. You have to somehow replace the good feeling that your heroes get from saving the day with something equally as intoxicating...something along the lines of treating a heroin addict with methadone!
- You are going to need to devise rewards for information sharing and documentation...perhaps prizes for the best knowledge-base articles, get your heroes to run workshops for other IT team members or for super-users out in the business - in this way they still get that feeling of being important, and perhaps a little superior!
- You do need to tread carefully, these people are often your most valuable team members, and you certainly can't afford to lose them - especially before they transfer that information!
- One other scenario deserves a very brief mention here - There is an even more dangerous species of hero…have you heard of Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy? This is where someone will cause another person to become ill and need medical treatment in order to be the center of attention and save the day…particularly dangerous when the hero involved is a doctor or a nurse…while less likely to have lethal consequences…there are actually people out there in our industry who will intentionally cause IT issues, such as overloading a server, tweaking a setting in a app or some other surreptitious activity designed to cause a system failure…then they are able to race to the rescue and save the day and receive the accolades they crave for their outstanding work.
- Fortunately these heroes are rare, but if you find one in your organization…there really is only one option, and I think you probably know what that is! I have only witnessed this type of behavior on one occasion, and it took quite some time to work out what was going on and the person concerned jumped before they were pushed when it became clear that more and more people were becoming suspicious and incident records were starting to paint a very clear picture.
- So have you worked out if you have a hero complex? Check yourself against the following scenario. Your phone rings at midnight - it's the oncall techie from work, there is an outage on a service that you manage - do you:
- So, pretty clear that if answer one sounds like you, you need some serious help with your addiction!
- If you are more in the number two category, you still need some help, but you are willing to share knowledge when you have to
- . If you fit into category three, congratulations...when and where can I hear your conference presentation?
- Knowledge is power, and sharing knowledge levels the playing field and allows everyone to do their share of the work. Build a culture where rewards come from sharing knowledge and enabling the other members of the team to shine, where success comes when the whole team works together together and stands out as a group rather than as individuals. Reward teamwork, not individual heroics…
- Of course Knowledge Management does an awful lot more than just help with your superhero infestation! I have real trouble understanding any organistion that does not have at least a rudimentary system for capturing common fixes, known errors and major incident resolutions.
- I had thought that this was symptomatic of the good old Kiwi “she’ll be right” attitude and fly by the seat of your pants number 8 wire mentality…just deal with stuff as it happens and cope with the fallout later. But I discovered when I undertook a couple of ITSM process improvement assignments in the UK that it is not confined to good old NZ.
- Managing knowledge and sharing wisdom, is something that every organization knows they should be doing, plans on doing, talks about, but so often leaves it on the back boiler because firefighting gets in the way of forward planning. You need to manage knowledge so that you can stop firefighting, but you are so busy throwing water on the flames that you just don’t have time to plan for knowledge sharing.
- But this presentation would not be much use to you if I just told you How important it is How difficult it is It is time to take Knowledge management – or at an even more basic level – knowledge sharing – out of the too hard basket. So lets get a few basics out of the way:
- Don’t try to do Knowledge Management by stealth…you need to get everyone onboard, otherwise you are just setting yourself and the organization up for failure. KM is not something that can fly under the radar, you need a well defined process that everyone understands and a repository that is easy to find and use. In my experience, this needs to be a real project with specific time and resources allocated to it, a project plan with clear objectives and milestones and a budget. If you cannot get management to support this effort with a budget and resources, then you may as well pack up and go home.
- Whether you use a tool that the organization already has in place to go out and find a specific KM tool, there is very little chance that it will be fit for purpose out of the box. Allow time to configure it for your specific way of working…and make sure you understand just what that way of working actually is. Talk to people, understand their processes, try not to reinvent the wheel, if at all possible – I will admit that, in some cases the current ‘way of working’ will never fit…so then you need to make sure you manage that cultural change as well and remember that change is painful and difficult for many people, and you will be asking for a radical change in attitude from many people in the business and you will be adding significant overheads for people who just like to get on and fix things and then move on to the next one – believe me when I say that there will be push-back, and the hardest pushback will be from your heroes!
- Communicate the reasons for the change to IT and to the business, make sure everyone understands the long-term benefits of this change and gets that there may some short term pain while existing knowledge is recorded. You need to provide mentorship to those who are most affected and with the knowledge that is currently residing between their ears…in many cases these will be your heroes. So as I said before, tread carefully, and make sure they still get some accolades, but this time for sharing their wisdom with the business.
- Measure your progress and feed this back to the business and your IT team…give your heroes some tangible benefits as the value of Knowledge Management is realized…they will now have more time available to be spent on innovation, so make sure that you make this happen, if the promised rewards do not materialize you will have unhappy people on your hands, and there is nothing quite as dangerous as an unhappy superhero!
- Manage the people side of this change, this is far more critical to the success of the initiative than the tool. Knowledge management relies completely on the willingness of your people to share their wisdom with the rest of the organization. If you get their backs up by underestimating the importance of managing the cultural change side of the project you have set yourself up for inevitable failure…the best KM tool is worthless if your processes are circumvented by unhappy individuals…don't underestimate the power of some team-building initiatives to make everyone understand that they are in this together and that team success is more satisfying than individual heroics.
- A recent assignment saw me in an organization that does not understand the importance of knowledge management – actually probably has no idea what the term means (their IT manager told me that they bought ITIL 2 years ago and it didn’t work!) - and to be perfectly honest, I find it quite distressing to see people floundering around finding solutions to the same issues that someone else on the team has already fixed countless times. There has been fairly blatant drive to move support for applications out into the business because support and knowledge within the IT team is, shall we say, pretty hit and miss…it all depends on who picks up the phone. Much of the ‘IT Department” is becoming irrelevant. This is a picture of Shadow IT at its worst. It is getting to the stage where the IT department has little or no idea of the range of applications that are actually being used out in the business…this leaves so many potential risks for the, with many checkponts that we take for granted, like security, availability, capacity and the rest, being taken for granted by the people making these purchasing decisions.
- Now, if this was a conscious decision taken at a strategic level, I would not have a huge issue with it (whether or not I agree with that structure is an entirely different presentation)…but there is no strategic drive to disseminate support around the organization and move IT functions into business units. It is just evolving this way and I think much of that goes back to a lack of retained knowledge….the service desk has not proven their worth because it just takes too long to get simple issues resolved and there is far too much going over old ground time and time again.
- There is a reluctance from the organization to log calls with IT and wait for responses so they are circumventing the service desk and often going straight to vendors for their support. The sad thing is that there are really good people in this team, but they are not being developed because everybody around them is afraid to let their power, in the form of knowledge, go. Providing good self-help options and documenting wisdom within the IT support team would greatly improve the reputation of the IT team, improve their job satisfaction, and share the superpowers of their heroes amongst the whole team.
- Now, just because every presentation hs to have a mandatory pie chart included…this one is guaranteed to be completely accurate with no margin of error required!
- Sorry Folks, have to take any opportunity to show of my favourite superheroes! These superheroes I like…IT Superheroes, not so much!