Seven Habits of Highly Effective IT Pros

I may write about IT for a living, but that doesn’t make me an IT professionals. I’m just someone who’s worked in multiple organizations with innumerable IT staffers on projects big and small, brilliant and misbegotten. I’ve known some extraordinarily skilled IT pros over the years. I never get tired of watching them in action and learning from their philosophies, tactics, and deeds.

Herewith, a few characteristics that I’ve seen in the best of the best.

1. They’re intrepid. By which I mean they know how to get stuff done. Sometimes through conventional means, sometimes through creative and counterintuitive ones. None of them are the type that a colleague of mine once called “Dr. No.”

2. They’re masters of the possible. Some IT pros want to do everything in the most perfect way possible–”perfect” often being defined in a way that makes it impossible to get there at all. So projects with huge potential never get going, period. I like the pros who figure out how to accomplish things in ways that will happen, and will bring immediate benefits. Even if the solution they choose isn’t the most technically ambitious and/or elegant one.

3. They fix what’s broken. In any company of any size that’s been around for awhile, there are systems, technologies, and services that just plain don’t work. (Sometimes they never worked, and sometimes they’ve just been rendered obsolete with the passage of time.) They can be so deeply ingrained in a company’s processes that getting rid of them is a nightmare–but doing so is far better than letting them fester. The best IT pros get that, and take action.

4. They’re well-informed skeptics. They’re among the first to know about new products, services, and technologies that aim to solve real-world problems that their organizations have. But they’re tough customers–good at avoiding fads, half-baked concepts, and just plain bad ideas.

5. They’re thrifty. I’ve known IT pros who pinched pennies until Abe Lincoln was blue in the face. Not good. I’ve known ones who never met an expensive project they didn’t want to pour money into. Equally bad. The best ones are extremely careful with money, but they understand that much of IT is about investment: figuring out how to spend in ways that’ll pay off in greater productivity and/or cost savings, either immediately or long-term. (One of my favorite IT guys ever: The one who figured out how to put dual monitors on every desk in my department, even though there was no budget for it.)

6. They don’t get paranoid. Certain IT pros I’ve worked with seem to be motivated by fear of being rendered unnecessary. Finding technical efficiencies and putting power in the hands of users kind of unnerves them. Much more appealing and indispensable: IT pros who are confident enough of their value to the organization that they do everything in their power to simplify IT, not to keep it as a voodoo that only they know how to do.

7. They’re humane. Every IT project worth anyone’s money and effort is about helping human beings do better work. The most impressive IT pros I’ve ever worked with are just as good at dealing with people–be they cubicle dwellers or corporate overlords–as they are with technology.

Come to think of it, none of these characteristics is uniquely tied to IT–they’re just behaviors that are common among people in business who I admire, period. Which makes sense, since yet another thing that the most skilled IT pros have in common is that they’re not just good technologists, but good bisnez people.

What skills and strategies do you see in the IT pros you admire most?

(Harry McCracken is editor of Technologizer.)

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