Forget About the Shortage of IT Workers!
Attracting and retaining skilled IT (information technology) workers is becoming one of the key factors to many companies' e-business success. If your business is like most, you are having trouble getting enough talented help to fill your positions. This means that that you may be delaying or even losing e-business opportunities.
The standard advice won't work
Unfortunately, most companies are getting inadequate advice on how to solve
their IT staffing problems. The standard advice is to hire people away from your
competitors, and do everything you can retain your IT employees. For
most companies, these tactics won't do the trick. Why? Because your
competitors are following the same exact advice. They are are hiring
away your technology workers and will do their best to retain them.
Most companies look at this problem as a shortage of skilled workers, and attempt to solve that problem. Trying to solve the problem of too few workers usually is impossible, because there are just too few good people to go around. At best, this strategy will allow you to tread water.
Forget about the people shortage
Successful companies must look at the problem another way. Yes, there is
a shortage of skilled IT people. But this also represents an excess
of IT work. Companies need to look at the problem of eliminating
some of this excess work. This may be the most important and effective
strategy in combating the shortage of people.
At first glance, it may seem like it is impossible to eliminate your needs for computer people. Businesses are becoming more and more computerized and every day e-commerce becomes more important. How can one reduce the need for IT people in an environment like this?
10 Ways to Reduce Excess IT Work
1. Improve your project efficiency
There are several ways to reduce your need for more IT staff. One of the
first things you should look at is the efficiency of your IT projects.
About half of all IT projects fail to meet their goals, budget and
schedule. Most of the time these projects fail because of business, not
technological, issues. One of the reasons many IT projects fail is
because they don't start with clear business goals. Few projects can
succeed without these goals. Make sure that any IT project you start on
has clear business goals, and well-defined specifications on how the
resulting system should work.
Just as deadly to a complex project are goals that are poorly
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