Use this business practices document to ensure IT responsiveness and availability

To build a high performance IT department, your staff needs to define and follow certain business behaviors. This sample document serves as a model for creating your own set of IT business practices.

IT is not a good career choice for those who like calm, quiet, and order. Every day presents new challenges, and learning to live with pressure is an essential requirement for success. But how can the CIO focus staff on the key projects and day-to-day activities that lead to a high performance IT organization? One effective tool is the IT business practices document, which spells out expected behavior for IT staff.

This document, created by the Enterprise Computing Institute, will provide a foundation for working with your own staff to draft a set of behavioral standards that--if adhered to-- will earn your IT organization the reputation of delivering excellent customer service. The behaviors are simple and straightforward, but by outlining them in a document, you can define expectations and align activities with other processes, such as change and problem management. Here are a few examples:

• An Unscheduled Outage Notification will be sent by [the responsible party] to affected employees using the standardized format as soon as we become aware of the outage. A follow-up message will be sent immediately after service has been restored.
• The out-of-office e-mail feature will be used whenever someone is out of the office for more than one business day.
• Voicemails will be cleared so that callers never receive the "voicemail box full" message.

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