2. Odom’s Tennessee Pride Values
Trust
Honesty
Personal Integrity
Mutual Respect
Open Mindedness
Ethical Behavior
3. Odom’s Tennessee Pride
Mission
Dedicated to delighting
customers with products and
services
4. Odom’s Tennessee Pride Vision
To be recognized as the leader
in changing the industry
through technology
5. IT Division Goals
Outstanding Customer
Service
Comprehensive
St
i ce er
ew
Se tom
Stewardship
ar
s
ds
rv
Cu
h ip
Professional
Development Professional
Development
6. Outstanding Customer Service
What do our “customers” want?
Systems Availability
Responsiveness
Quality of Work
Proactive Solutions
9. Outstanding Customer Service
1. Systems Availability
Maintaining “Up Time” on Servers
Rotational Replacement
3-4 years on critical servers
Planned & Tested Upgrades
Understand the impact
Planning the Bandwidth
Proactive Capacity Expansion
10. Outstanding Customer Service
1. Responsiveness
Begins with Availability & Accessibility
Maintained Through Communication &
Feedback
With Users
With IT Team
Quick request to
response cycle time
11. Outstanding Customer Service
1. Quality of Work
Know Your Systems – Become the Expert
Suggest Better Methods Where
Appropriate
Ask for Help
Share Your Successes
12. Outstanding Customer Service
1. Proactive Solutions
Look For Opportunities To Improve
Processes
If Something Needs
Fixing — Fix It or
Notify Supervisor
Learn What Your
Customer Does,
How They
Work
13. Comprehensive Stewardship
1. Protection of IT Assets
Identification of Assets & Potential
Risk(s) due to loss of use of the
asset
Our IT Personnel are Assets
Publish a Backup/Protection Plan
Test the Plan
Implement the Plan
Test the Plan
14. Comprehensive Stewardship
1. Iterative Planning Processes
Achieve Incremental, Measurable
Improvement Year-by-Year, Month-
by-Month, Week-by-Week
100% Participation in The Process
Visibility To All
15. Comprehensive Stewardship
1. Personal Responsibility
We are collectively and individually
charged with being stewards of our
IT assets.
Comprehensive, tested procedural
documentation
One of our non-replaceable assets is
our time.
16. Professional Development
1. Realistic Assessment of Objectives
Objectives Need To Be Specific
They can be classified as long-term
(over 2 years), medium-term (1-2
years), short-term (< 1 year) and
immediate (< 1 month)
They will change over time
17. Professional Development
1. Planning the Work – How do I
accomplish my objectives?
Prioritize
Schedule
Objectives = Projects
Projects involve one or more tasks
Tasks and be planned, worked &
completed
18. Professional Development
1. Working the Plan
What are my current projects?
What tasks did I work on today to
make progress on my projects?
What roadblocks do I have that are
impeding my progress?
Progress Reporting
19. Professional Development
1. Personal Development
What can I do to improve my
performance? (habits, processes,
time management)
What do I need to learn?
Am I allocating time to my own
education?
This meeting is about Vision. The vision is to become a world-class IT department. This session is to give us a framework for getting there.
Chuck Odom used to say, “IT will not be a roadblock.” His intent was to make sure that OTP always had the tools needed to accomplish whatever objectives were placed before us. However, we all know that we did not have a plan that was communicated throughout the department and to our customers. I am broadening our vision through stating some specific & measurable goals for the IT division. These goals will insure that our vision is attainable.
Who is our customer & what do they want? Our customer is anyone who interacts with any OTP IT or communication system or that system’s outputs.
The IT Division is entrusted with a critical set of assets. Without these assets, the company might not survive.
To becoming a world-class IT Division, we have to have world-class IT personnel. How do we get there? world-class (wûrld ' klăs ' ) adj. 1. Ranking among the foremost in the world; of an international standard of excellence; of the highest order: a world-class figure skater. 2. Great, as in importance, concern, or notoriety. World Class Manufacturing - A definition World Class Manufacturers are those that demonstrate industry best practice. To achieve this companies should attempt to be best in the field at each of the competitive priorities (quality, price, delivery speed, delivery reliability, flexibility and innovation). Organizations should therefore aim to maximize performance in these areas in order to maximize competitiveness. We have to be focused and intentional.
We have a great opportunity to improve our internal IT processes through adopting better planning methods and tools. We are not going to “micromanage” your work. Everyone will participate in the process. The process will become the monitoring tool.
Being a steward means we are entrusted with protecting our IT assets and using them wisely. A vital part of protecting our assets is protecting ourselves against loss due to personnel unavailability. We must document all procedures that we perform as a regular part of our duties so that the procedure can be carried out by someone else who may know little or nothing about the process beforehand. We are not being a good steward if we are wasteful in our time management. We are not being a good steward if we are unavailable and no one else in the department knows where we are or when we will return. The key to this is communication within the IT department. If you are going to be out of the office, you must let someone know when you will return. As a matter of protocol, you should always e-mail special circumstances to your direct supervisor.
We have various sets of objectives that we will work on over the course of a year. Some of these are stated explicitly in our performance review, others will develop during the year. These objectives must be described clearly so that we can measure our progress toward achieving them. In our IT team meetings, we will review our progress on making our objectives as a group.
First things first. It is absolutely essential that we keep our focus on the right things by prioritizing our objectives according to the schedule we set for their delivery. From a planning point of view, we must break our objectives down into the tasks that are needed to accomplish the objective. Task progress can be monitored and reported.
We should use our projects and tasks to keep us focused on those things that will allow us to meet our goals. We need to monitor our progress and report any obstacles we encounter.
Incremental improvement is the key to long-term success in our profession. We can all improve what we are doing, how we do it and our ability to do it well. Identify your strengths and weaknesses and make a plan to improve upon your weaknesses. “Downtime” is crucial for IT workers. You must schedule time each week to keep up with what is going on inside your particular specialty. If you do not, you will eventually fall behind and you will be less valuable as an employee.
