Column: Motor Management
"I’ve bought a new car!" he announced with pride.
"Oh, great! What kind then?" was of course my first response.
"I don’t know. One with four wheels that’ll help me get to work and back, and to the supermarket."
This different approach also exists between individuals who had already written their first program by the time they were 12 and can read and write with a DOS box, and those who only use their computer to download the IKEA kitchen planner and check their email. Managers often want the best, the nicest and the newest for their users because best, nice and new is generally more stable and easier to manage. But sometimes because it’s just nice and new. The end-user, in particular, does not want to be bothered with a detailed explanation of the migration and update plans, but does want to know how it will improve his or her specific situation. Will logging in take less time? Can I now send and receive larger attachments? End-users couldn’t care less about the underlying strategy, which can have a fair amount of influence on all management activities. As long as they can rest their cup of coffee without making a mess, the size of the rims is unimportant. It is vital that IT management organizations take the time to consider these different approaches when communicating with end-users. This applies on both a personal and a general level. If the IT specialist has to restore a database that the end-user himself has broken, then I can imagine that that is frustrating and that as a manager you have the tendency to let fly. The end-user, on the other hand, doesn’t have the knowledge of an experienced IT worker, and everyone makes mistakes. System administrators might also regard their clients’ questions, who simply drop by, as interfering – certainly when it’s a relatively straightforward question and you’re working on something a lot more complicated. You can partly deal with this by protecting the specialists from these sort of in-between things, but more importantly is the understanding that the specialist and the end-user have an entirely different approach to the same thing – in this case the computer.
As manager you want to get as much horsepower out of your vehicle as you can, but the end-user is perhaps satisfied with a glove compartment that lights up when you open it. As a manager, try to see the other’s point of view, and fix the light when it’s broken. That you’ve also sought to tune the chipset for the motor management, is something that you can be really proud of and that your client is going to appreciate, without realizing it. The car accelerates even faster, the light works and the coffee doesn’t spill all over the edge of the mug. In the end, both parties are happy with the same car, but for very different reasons. That’s the best you could hope for, right?
Annemarie Moeijes is a consultant at TOPdesk and has years of experience with implementations and changes within various organizations.
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