5 Tips on Running an Efficient IT Team as a New Manager

Now that you’ve worked your way up to manager, you may realize that you’re not quite sure of the best way to build your team. For a company to grow, you’ll find that management is largely comprised of creatively tackling problems that impede your team’s ability to do their job efficiently.

Surprisingly, these problems can run the gamut from technical issues to confusion about work expectations or even interpersonal arguments. There is a lot more to being a manager than just that nice pay increase.

How to Run an Efficient IT Team

It’s important to realize that an efficient team is a happy team. Effective managers know that happy employees tend to increase productivity. So the real goal is to guide your team into efficiency. There are a few key secrets to making key decisions in your position.

Make Sure Everyone Knows Their Role

Although it may seem obvious to you, it’s very important that each employee has a clear outline of their job expectations. This means they need to know goals they should strive for, as well as what projects or tasks they should not work on.

Having clear job objectives for each employee will help you as well. When the time comes for employee yearly reviews, you can simply look at the goals and roles you have assigned to each employee and assess them accordingly.

Foster an Agile Approach to the Workflow

Agile workflow has been shown to help increase employee productivity and satisfaction. Keep things moving by creating shorter tasks with deadlines.

Then once deadlines are met, reassess the product and process, and then make any changes to either. These shorter deadlines help to keep employees on task and the regular feedback helps everyone to improve consistently.

Solve Problems Rather Than Fix Symptoms

Members of your team may come to you from time to time with complaints or suggestions to fix issues relating to workflow. This is when you will feel less like a manager and more like a detective.

It is more important to understand the root issue of a problem than to simply put a bandaid over the resulting symptoms. If you simply fix the symptoms, the reasons behind them will keep coming back over and over, lessening your team’s productivity.

Keep Meetings Short and Productive

As a manager, you’ll most likely feel like your workday is spent in a perpetual meeting. These meetings, while necessary, leave you little time to do your actual work.

This is why it’s extremely important to keep your meetings as efficient as possible. A simple way to do this is to write out a bulleted list of important points you need to make or questions that you have for the person leading the meeting.

Encourage others to keep this in mind when they plan for meetings as well. This will help everyone keep on topic and should make those meetings more organized and less grueling.

Emulate Great Managers That You Have Worked For….Mostly

Think about the best managers you’ve ever had and what made them so great. Were they honest, serious, or easy-going? Maybe they gave you challenges or perhaps they let you work independently. Was this manager effective in their leadership and able to run an efficient team?

There are lots of managerial styles, but some work better for workplace happiness than others. Take the best of management styles that you experienced as a team member and treat your employees the same way.

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Congrats and welcome to the world of effective management. It’s important to create clear goals for your team as well as listen to their perspectives. This will help you to pinpoint any potential causes of inefficiency before they become a major problem.

Look to your past experiences as a member of a work team for guidance. As your experience grows you will find that you’ve collected many insights over the years that lend themselves to creating a productive work environment for both you and your employees.