scotlad's picture Submitted by scotlad on
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Management and Leadership

 

Hi

I've been asked to help set up a new IT department providing the 'normal' range of services (help desk, incident management, projects, change, upgrades, IT Architecture, IT Strategy). This will involve about 100 people.

Whilst there are always variations, many of the issues we face are very common. How to set targets, how to measure performance, developing skills, applying IT best practice, justifying investments etc.

I don't like reinventing the wheel so have been looking for some resources to help with this. The only thing that looks useful so far is a book called "Information Systems Management" by Barbara McNurlin et al (see

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Systems-Management-Barbara-McNurlin/dp/0131579517/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3202TGW3M6XVS&colid=33IWV8KMY9GTI

 

Is this book any good? Are there any other books/resources people would recommend??

 

Many thanks

 

Scotlad

tlhausmann's picture
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Submitted by tlhausmann on Tuesday November 9th, 2010 12:16 pm

Scotlad,

Are you talking about a 100 person IT department or setting up an IT shop for a 100 person company?

You also don't mention the line of work you are in...the nature of the IT operation depends on the line of work. Send me a PM with your contact information and I can provide a few resources. This may be an opportunity for you to look into finding a mentor as well.

http://www.manager-tools.com/2006/06/basics-of-mentoring-part-1-of-2

scotlad's picture
Submitted by scotlad on Wednesday November 10th, 2010 10:23 am

Hi

Thanks for the offer - I'll be in touch.

For clarification this is a 100 person IT organisation within a larger company.

 

Thanks

Jon

mattpalmer's picture
Submitted by mattpalmer on Monday August 22nd, 2011 5:08 am

For anything related to IT operations, I always recommend "The Practice of System and Network Administration", by Limoncelli et al.  A lot of it is written with the target audience of operational staff, but it has a part covering management, and every chapter has a lot of useful information that I believe would be of value to managers to at least have a passing knowledge of the things that it is talking about.

 

jaredavd's picture
Submitted by jaredavd on Tuesday August 23rd, 2011 3:09 pm

I'd look into getting a service management team trained up on ITIL and picking the parts of ITIL that best work for your organization's culture.  ITSM Academy has excellent training and certification courses (stay away from New Horizons or Global Knowledge, their classes are inferior to ITSM Academy), and there are service management consultants all over the place.  I'm at a 400 person IT department right now and we're just migrating to ITIL based service management and I'm reminded daily of how much easier it would have been setting things up with ITIL in mind to begin with.  ITIL not only suggests logical ways to set up your infrastructure, it gives you goals, key performance indicators, metrics to measure the KPIs, gauges for success, and so forth.

 

ITIL is a library of 5 books that are rather dry if you just get them and read them, but beneficial if you go through training on the contents of the books.  The library is pretty expensive (anywhere between 500 and 600 for the whole set, depending on where you get it), but worth the investment.

 

Edit: Sorry, didn't realize this post was from last year.  Advice still stands, though it's likely rather late to be taken.