Gary Drumm – PMP, ITIL

The very first habit in Dr. Covey’s book is be proactive.  While this is the very first step, it’s an extremely difficult one in the IT world.  Generally speaking much of IT is reactive, that is we tend to react to events or incidents.  We’re the fire fighters of the computer world, without all the glory of being and actual fire fighter. We react to hardware failures, software glitches, virus and malware attacks, and user errors.  It seems as though IT is always reacting and never just… acting.

So how do you be proactive in a reactive environment? I think there are 3 critical elements that can help accomplish that goal, I like to call it “PEP Talk”: Planning, Education, and Process.

Planning is often talked about but seldom performed… adequately.  Yet, if more time was taken to properly plan then there would be far fewer incidents and errors throughout the entire IT world.  I often look at projects as 80% planning and 20% execution.  If I spend 80% of my alotted time properly planning my project, then I will have a good understanding of the risks, the potenial issues, the impact on my existing infrastructure, and so on.

Planning is a proactive activity.  A plan is simply “A scheme or method of acting, doing, proceeding, making, etc, developed in advance“.  In other words, planning cannot be a reactive activity.  Certainly you can plan what you will do now that event A, B, or C has already happened, which is reactive in nature, but your plan will be proactive because it is developed prior to the response to the reactive event.  In other words, “Oh crap, such and such has happened, we need to develop a plan to fix it and make sure it doesn’t happen again”.

Education is the second proactive step in the PEP Talk.  If you have a good plan, but lack the eduction to exectute it, then the plan is worthless.  Now, to be fair, I’m throwing eduction and training into the same mix, because they really are the same thing, that and “PTP Talk” doesn’t sound as cool.  At any rate, you and your staff must be committed to constant eduction and training.  The IT field changes so rapidly, that just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, you realize how little you actually know.

It’s sad that more companies don’t understand this.  They just will not spend the time and money to properly train and educate their employees.  Be it on advanced networking topologies, or simple basic desktop usage.  This is particularly insidious in the IT world because IT people are expected to have all of the answers, for everything, all of the time.  They are fully expected to foot the bill for their own training and education, even though the company would directly benefit from investing in their IT personnel. Taking the time to educate your people minimizes errors, reduces the time necessary to fix issues, helps them to better plan implementations, and improves maintenance results.

Lastly, there’s Process.  A former boss once explained it to me very simply, “Process helps protect us from human error.”.  If you think about it, he’s absolutely correct.  Human beings fail, we’re working on a problem or maybe just performing routine maintence, then an interruption throughs us off and we miss a critical step or overlook some important peice of data, and then we suddenly find ourselves in reaction mode.

Process addresses the human error issue by mapping out what should be done and how.  If there’s a checklist of activities, for example, that shows how a new server should be deployed and hardened, then the engineer or technician is far less likely to miss those important steps to getting the job done properly.  Process, however; takes proper planning, and proper planning takes proper education.

Ultimately, having the ability to be proactive in IT is the responsibility of those in IT.  We can say that management doesn’t give us time to plan effectively, or they refuse to provide us with the training and education we need, but it’s ultimately our responsibility.  Interestingly Covey talks about responsibility as well.  Responsibility is response ability, or the ability to respond.  It is different from reaction in that to react is to take instinctive action without planning or forethought.  A response, however; is to carefully consider the possible answers or solutions before taking action.

So we are ultimatley responsible for planning our implementations, educating and training ourselves, and developing our processes so that we can spend more time proactively managing our environments, and less time reacting to fire fighter situations.  Be proactive.

Next week, we go into more detail on on step two: Begin With The End In Mind.