How do I mangage my IT guy when he is smarter than me?

[easyway444]

We r a small business but growing fast. Somewhere in the range of 5-10 million annual sales. Sales not profit. Big difference as im sure you know.

We have around 28 employees in multiple different businesses in multiple locations in multiple states. So communication or IT is very important to us. I have a guy who is very good but I am sure I am not managing him very well and that he is pulling the wool over my eyes somehow as to what he does all day. All because I really dont know how to check what he is doing.

Are there reports or things I should be asking him for once a week or month or so? How can I track his output? He runs servers for us and might be using them for personal use. How can I check that? Anything else I should be doing to manage this resource better and to protect the business from bad practices.

I appreciate any help.

[Harold Mansfield]

If you were smarter than all of your employees, you would be doing your job correctly.

Sounds like you have reason to mistrust your IT guy. Have an independent auditor come in and check things out.
I'm curious what makes you think he is using your servers for personal stuff?
Do you know any of his websites? You can easily check to see where the domains are pointed.

[CloptonCapital]

There are forensic data services, once a company claimed I was missusing their computers, forensics said not true

[Dan Furman]

I'm a bit confused here... Why do you feel you need to check what he is doing? I subscribe that you pay for results, not busy time. Don't overmanage here - in general terms, if you hire him to run IT and IT is running, you're good. Who cares what his "output" is? What even is an acceptable output?

That said, if you have reason to mistrust him, either in that he's doing unethical things or not doing his job correctly, then yes, perhaps you should have things checked/audited.

[Ade]

My 2 cents - came across this thread and I thought I might be able to offer some assistance.

A possible way to gain visibility into what he does, improve communication with him and review your IT operations would be to ask for him to document the processes in the following areas.

System monitoring
Backup and recovery
Security
Disaster recovery

Insist that the documents are written in a language that you can understand so that he does not blind you with techno babble.

You will gain an insight into these vital areas of IT operations and start a valuable dialog with the employee. Moreover if he has nothing to hide the attention will make them feel valued as he is able to show case his skills and competence.

You will also have something tangible to measure and review his performance with.

The resulting documentation could then be reviewed and verified by an independent source if you still think it necessary.

[Dan Furman]

My 2 cents - came across this thread and I thought I might be able to offer some assistance.

A possible way to gain visibility into what he does, improve communication with him and review your IT operations would be to ask for him to document the processes in the following areas.

System monitoring
Backup and recovery
Security
Disaster recovery

Insist that the documents are written in a language that you can understand so that he does not blind you with techno babble.

You will gain an insight into these vital areas of IT operations and start a valuable dialog with the employee. Moreover if he has nothing to hide the attention will make them feel valued as he is able to show case his skills and competence.

You will also have something tangible to measure and review his performance with.

The resulting documentation could then be reviewed and verified by an independent source if you still think it necessary.

This is a GREAT idea.

[MyITGuy]

Are there reports or things I should be asking him for once a week or month or so? How can I track his output? He runs servers for us and might be using them for personal use. How can I check that? Anything else I should be doing to manage this resource better and to protect the business from bad practices.

I appreciate any help.

Do you have any sort of ticketing system in place? If not, this would be the first step in monitoring your IT staffs productivity (Spiceworks is a free product that I highly recommend). Every thing that he does should be logged into this system for everyone's benefit (I.E. Requests from users, clients and etc to tasks that he is doing on his own such as maintenance, upgrades, changes and etc):
1st - It can be used for his personal use to ensure he is keeping on track/prioritizing his tasks appropriately.
2nd - It can be used by you/management to occasionally check in on to ensure there aren't any outstanding issues
3rd - It can be used for reporting purposes (I.E. Tickets created/worked/closed, and how much time was spent on each).
4th - You can utilize the reports to see if you have problematic users, equipment or services.

In regards to this person using company resources for personal gain, this is something that would require an outside firm to perform an audit. There are so many areas that would need to be explored that it would be difficult and time consuming to walk you through over the web.

If you would like to have an external company perform an audit, feel free to contact me. It would be great if your in the central Florida region as thatch where I mainly operate from, but I can also perform audits remotely (Although they may not be as in-depth)

[Bishop]

I've been in IT for over 20 years the last 5 as an IT manager. This can be one of the hardest things to put your finger on because it's impossible to estimate how long certain tasks should take, even if a task is repeated regularly there are so many variables that can come up to change the amount of time required.

I agree with what Dan said to an extent, micromanaging might not give you any insight and looking at the big picture accomplishments is certainly valuable. The real question is could you have someone else for about the same pay do significantly more work? Does he has a peer working with him to vouch for his work ethic? Bringing in a short term contractor on consultant might not help much as I'm guessing he will put on his best face during the process and reviewing past work accomplishments is near impossible to determine if accurate time was accounted for.

MyITGuy has a good point with Spiceworks. We use it where I work and it's great for making sure things don't get missed. It's also good for determining how many things the IT people have to work on. I made a rule at work that any bugs have to have a ticket, even emergency requests have to be followed up with a ticket for tracking purposes. You might be surprised how many things he does when you start seeing all the tickets. Ours is setup so that a user only has to send the problem in an email and it auto creates a ticket. Your IT guy can also log time spent for the ticket.

Another option may be to implement a time accounting system where they have to list the high level tasks worked on and hours spent. This can be really hard to get people to follow and if you only make the IT guy do it, he will know something is up.

On occasion we have used workstation monitoring software. While he works on many different computers and servers, if he is goofing around he probably does that from his own computer.

[websonalized]

My 2 cents: to begin with, if you do not trust him I think you should not have him as part of your team. I feel trust is very important to communicate respectfully and openly. So from these, I would speak with him about what I sense, and I would negotiate with him, and plan with him, ways in which you can monitor his activity. In other words, invite him to be a good team player. If you feel he is not honest, why would you want him near you?

[chrisaukcam]

Well as in any company you want to eliminate single points of failure. It's the old "if he was hit by a bus tomorrow" question. What would happen if he put in a weeks notice and said he was leaving next Friday? I have worked IT for a good bit of my life. There are two good posts here the one about System monitoring, Backup and recovery, Security, Disaster recovery is one. If your computer room caught on fire tonight, what would happen tomorrow? Is your data being backed up? A hard drive dies, is there a back up copy of the data on that drive that can be reloaded? IT is great when things are running smooth (and if things are running smooth, then maybe he is doing a great job), but when things go awry it can be be source of frustration. I have a small business on the side, but I work fulltime for a big company, when our software goes down, factories don't operate. So we feel it when software breaks. We backup our systems nightly, and have redundancy so that if something breaks we have a backup to run the software. Firewalls to prevent intrusion from the outside, etc.

The ticketing system post is a good idea. As long as he documents what he did to fix a problem. If he closed problems with no details then it doesn't help. But if he documents what he did, then there is value in that aspect of the system. It builds a database of solutions for the next guy. Also having tickets gives some idea of what he does with his time. Although with IT work it is two things generally - projects where you build new things, and maintenance where you fix what you built. Anyway it would help to document how time is being spent - how much time for new development and how much time for maintenance of the existing system. For tax purposes, these may go into two different buckets. One is capitalized and one is an expense. So for accounting purposes alone there is value in tracking what he does.

I think you are doing the right thing by analyzing how time is spent. If there are no standards and no documentation then it will be hard for his successor to come in and be productive