I have a couple of questions relating to a potential career opportunity that may be coming my way. I work on the development/business support side of my company’s IT department. Due to some ongoing restructuring, which will attempt to introduce a more hierarchical layout than the present flat one, a management role for the development/business side of the operation will be created. In the event this goes ahead yours truly has been earmarked as the leading candidate. That would leave 2 colleagues, who have been effectively been my peers for 10 years+, reporting to me. This is of some concern to me, though on its own not enough to prevent me from accepting the position. The big issue I would have is that there will be no extra resource hired to help me transition to the more senior position, in order to hand over my operational type tasks. My first question then would be a general one of asking for advice on handling this potential promotion, in particular on having to manage former peers who on top of having yours truly as a manager may also have to take on some extra work from me due to lack of additional resources.
My second question is on best practices to handling IT development requests. At present we have allowed a culture to ingrain itself in our company where, despite the availability of an on line help desk system users still walk in to the IT Department in an effort to prioritize their particular requests. The company has a cellular based manufacturing process for its various product lines. There is a lack of a cohesive approach from the business when making requests – e.g. Cell A needs a report ‘yesterday’ to make something happen but does not speak with Cell B, C and D to see if they have similar needs before coming to IT. IT is as much to blame for allowing this to develop and continue. Efforts to attempt to change this culture in the past have been too ‘softly softly’. We now need to be somewhat more assertive in this area, especially as we have such a small development team (2.5 heads) supporting a bespoke legacy ERP system. I would appreciate feedback on how others out there working in a similar environment manage their development needs. Apologies for the length of this post (more akin to a blog). I felt supplying background information to our current situation was necessary to assist with any feedback this may generate.
