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Are you wasting your IT Application Support budget?

July 3, 2010/0 Comments/in Technology Budgets/by admin

Are you wasting your IT Application Support budget?

The concept of Lean is based on eliminating waste from a process. Application Maintenance and Support is one of the largest IT costs for an enterprise. Waste from a large project can have significant short-term impacts. Waste in the Application Support area can far exceed project waste because of the long-term nature of support.

What is Application Maintenance and Support? If you are typical, you have Application Maintenance and Support teams consisting of a fixed number of resources deployed to provide following types of services:

1. Resolution of Incidents and Problems

2. Consultation Services – Answer questions about the operation of the system and provide planning services to customer

3. Scheduled services such as planned enhancements to add capabilities or provide custom one-time access to information

Do you have the right number of people assigned to the support team? How well do you handle spikes in support requirements? Are the support services beneficial or are they simply “busy work” to occupy a fixed team of resources? Are the supported applications providing value to the business?

Most of support activities are short in duration and require detailed knowledge of the system or time-consuming analysis and research. In order to avoid the time-consuming analysis, support teams are typically staffed with knowledgeable experts. It takes so long for a person to learn the application, organizations resist transferring staff which limits staffing flexibility, adds costs, and increases waste.

Support teams are staffed to handle spikes in problems that may occur during peak periods. A spike in enhancement requests may lead to a growing backlog because of the difficulty in orienting staff. A lull in priority work may leave the team under-utilized.

Most support teams encounter the following challenges:

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IT Job News – Top 5 Information Technology Careers

June 30, 2010/0 Comments/in IT Jobs/by admin

Often, when one thinks of an IT professional, the stereotype that comes to mind is that of the IT support person. While many IT professionals work in this capacity, the field is much more diverse than providing user-level support. Here, for instance, are the top 10 IT professions, along with a brief description of the main roles of each.

Lead Application Developer

Applications Architect

Messaging Administrators

Data Modeler

Network Manager

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Tags: top 5 it jobs, top 5 it jobs, it jobs, jobs for itpeople, it employment, it careers, it employment, it resume

Category: IT jobs

7 Tips for Creating a Training Program for an IT Project

June 29, 2010/0 Comments/in Dallas IT/by admin

Planning and executing a scalable end-user training strategy is a key element to software deployment planning and, ultimately, to the success of an IT project. Without an effective training plan, the end-users will most likely need to rely heavily on the project support team. This can be costly to your project with increase in the need for support resources, as well as a possible decrease in actual support for your project delivery.

Here are some tips to consider when developing a training strategy:

1. Don’t Make Assumptions about the technical skill level of the software end-users, especially when you’re rolling out software to an entire organization. Remember the adage, “When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me.” Since the technical skill level of the end-users can vary greatly, it is important that the training instructions are useful for technical novices, as well as experts. Create the instructions for the lowest technical-level end-user first and then you can create a summary set of instructions for the more advanced users. I find it helpful to think of my parents as the end-users when I write training instructions for the basic level. This helps me to remember to be extremely specific in my instructions. For example, when I help my mother navigate a website that is new to her, I coach her through every click of the mouse.

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Soft Skills for IT Managers

June 28, 2010/0 Comments/in Dallas IT Managers/by admin

Many people believe their value is based on what they know—and they don’t want to give that up.

Most of us have, at one time or another, worked with a colleague who hoarded information as if it were gold. And let’s not forget the manager who passed on company information only on a need-to-know basis (kind of like working for the CIA).

This approach to information is frustrating and counterproductive, but understandable. Many people believe their value to the company is based on what they know—and they don’t want to give up that perceived edge. Their theory is that if they share that knowledge with their co-workers, that will increase the co-workers’ value and diminish their own.

This is a battle that business has been fighting for decades, but it’s heated up during the past few years of ongoing layoffs, when employees are more interested in surviving than collaborating. Ironically, this is happening at a time when knowledge management and collaboration technologies are getting a lot of attention from business leaders, who understand how these technologies can benefit their organizations.

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Job Tips and Job News – Tips for Discouraged Job Seekers

June 28, 2010/0 Comments/in Information Technology, IT Workers, Job Seekers, Job Tips/by admin

Tired, discouraged, feeling like you’ll never find a job? Need a job, but nothing you do seems to be working?

When you’re having a tough time finding a job, or even finding jobs to apply for, it’s important to expand your job search. Don’t limit yourself to applying for the jobs you find posted online.

Companies may be hiring that don’t post job listings other than on their company web site – or not all. Expanding your job search will help you find unadvertised openings and enable you to proactively seek employment at companies of interest.

Make a Target List of Companies

If you don’t have a target list of companies yet – a short list of employers you would be thrilled to work for, it’s worthwhile taking the time to research company information and create a list of companies to target in your job search. All the information you need is available on the web, and it’s easy to find detailed information about potential employers online.

Once you have a list, the next step is outreaching to contacts at the company. Use LinkedIn’s companies section as a tool to find company information. You’ll be able see your contacts at the company, new hires, jobs posted, and company statistics. Check the company web site and Google the company to find more contacts at the employer who could be potentially be interested in hiring you.

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Retaining IT Workers – 8 Ways to Keep Your Best Workers on Board

June 25, 2010/0 Comments/in Dallas IT Contractors, Dallas IT Managers, Dallas IT Staff Augmentation, Dallas IT Staffing, IT, IT Budgets, IT Workers/by admin

The organizations honored as Best Places to Work are vastly different in many ways, but they tend to share an ability to keep their most productive people on board. While there’s never a good time to neglect retention, doing so now may prove to be especially costly. With economic conditions beginning to improve, some organizations are looking to increase staffing levels. And as job opportunities proliferate, IT professionals will be more likely to consider moving to a new employer. Businesses that don’t address this looming challenge will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Computerworld — The organizations honored as Best Places to Work are vastly different in many ways, but they tend to share an ability to keep their most productive people on board. While there’s never a good time to neglect retention, doing so now may prove to be especially costly. With economic conditions beginning to improve, some organizations are looking to increase staffing levels. And as job opportunities proliferate, IT professionals will be more likely to consider moving to a new employer. Businesses that don’t address this looming challenge will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Effective retention strategies may be based on unchanging core concepts such as providing recognition and helping employees with their career development. But that doesn’t mean an approach that worked prior to the downturn will be equally successful this year — or next. Here are eight ways to keep your best employees in the current environment:

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IT Job News – Slow Growth For IT Salaries

June 24, 2010/0 Comments/in Information Technology, IT, IT Budgets, IT Professionals, IT Spending, Uncategorized/by admin

As the recovery struggles to take wing, IT salaries in 2010 are rising just slightly over last year’s. At the same time, a number of benefits are on the decline. Some benefits, though, such as flex-work schedules, are increasing in popularity as employers attempt to keep valuable IT staffers, according to a new survey from Janco.

Go here to see the slideshow at Baseline

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IT Recruiting – The Changing Role of the IT Hero

June 19, 2010/0 Comments/in Information Technology, IT, IT Jobs, IT Professionals, IT Workers, Technology/by admin

Every IT organization relies on a handful of seriously talented technical artisans to take on the trickiest tasks in the data center. These folks are the script wranglers, the IT cowboys (and girls) who—through a brilliant infusion of intellect, competitive spirit and occasional subversion—make the data center work. They’re the heroes who make disproportionate contributions to the trade and we love them for it.

But times are changing and the role of the IT Hero is being reconsidered.

That is not to say that the IT Hero is any less loved or valued; in fact, the need for the IT Hero will persist ad infinitum. It’s just that circumstances are forcing IT leadership to look beyond the preternaturally gifted few to run the data center. As system scale and complexity compounds, change accelerates, and business lines demand more—faster—IT needs to clear this bottleneck.

Traditionally, the IT Hero wrote the scripts that made IT processes scale. But as software and deployment environments become ever more diverse and dynamic, these scripts grow like kudzu. What began as a way to economize IT has become a large cost center in its own right: Today, maintaining scripts is often as costly as maintaining IT systems themselves.

And guess who manages these scripts?

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IT Staffing – Permanent IT Jobs ‘Returning to Growth’

June 16, 2010/0 Comments/in DFW IT Staffing, Information Technology, Information Technology Field, Information Technology Organizations, Information Technology Projects, IT, IT Budgets, IT Candidates, IT Hiring, IT Job Growth, IT Job News, IT Jobs, IT Professionals, IT Spending, IT Staff, IT Staff Augmentation, IT Staffing, IT talent, IT Workers, Job Tips, technical recruiting, Technical Staffing, Technology Budgets/by admin

The IT jobs market is showing signs of recovery, particularly on the permanent side, according to Reed Specialist Recruitment.

Computerworld UK — The IT jobs market is showing signs of recovery, particularly on the permanent side, according to Reed Specialist Recruitment.

Andrew Gardner, senior divisional director of the technology division of Reed Specialist Recruitment, said that the number of available permanent jobs was picking up again particularly in SMEs, as well as in the financial services sector and in software houses.

“As part of the downturn, our permanent team took a mauling, but over the last five or six months, it has started to pick up again.

“We are now looking to build our permanent teams back up to meet the demand,” said Gardner.

Reed currently has a team of 25 in the permanent jobs division, and Gardner aims to recruit a further 20 in the next few months, which takes the total “slightly higher than we had before”.

Furthermore, Reed said its lead time between interviews and job offers has shortened to that of before the recession.

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