IT Coaching

This isn't so much about how to do technical things, it's more about some of the soft skills that come with IT. It doesn't matter what your focus is, at the end of the day we're really all just different flavors of Customer Service Reps. How we interact with the business can make or break our department's success. Now I'm not trying to suggest that I'm some kind of expert or anything, but I've been around, and experienced some radically different work environments.

Managing Up

Clicking buttons in Azure is easy, almost as easy as knowing which buttons to click! In my experience, un-cooperative technology is not really the frequent road block you'll run into in your career. Management is going to fill that role, and it's in your best interest to figure out how to work with management types.

Know your audience. Every single bullet below this one will have exceptions to the rule; it's important to have an idea how your audience will react to things.
NEVER bullshit your answers. If you don't know, "I'll have to get back to you on that" is your fallback. Executives don't know how technology works, but they do know how people work, and if they catch a wiff that you're bs'ing them, they will gain a lifelong impression that you don't really know what you're talking about, even when it's on subjects where you're the supreme expert.
Management likes green, and hates red. If you're reporting anything, clean up any unnecessary "red alerts" in the report.
Keep the details in your back pocket; initially just report the gist. If management wants more info on a particular topic, you can dazzle them by spitting out the relevant data on demand. If you're putting detail in your initial report, a) they're going to disassociate and not hear a damn thing you're saying, and b) if they don't understand that detail it will look like garbage filler.

The Customer's Perspective

You'll notice I refer to end users as "customers" frequently. End Users, Management, "The Business", business partners, etc. They're all the customer. We are the service provider. This does not change whether you're working at an MSP with traditional customers, or if you're in corporate IT and your fellow employees are the customers. Sometimes even your IT teammates are customers! Think about it; how often does the application team actually build a server? They ask the infrastructure team to do the hardware, then send it over. In this example, the app team is the customer, and the server is the delivered product.

Here's where it is important -- when something is broken, as far as the customer is concerned, broken is broken. It doesn't matter if they broke it, they're doing it wrong so things seem broken, or if they're actually working as intended and the user is just wrong. Broken is still broken. It's your job to relate to the customer and resolve the issue without being a dick about it.

Service Offered - A Zoom Sesh

So what is the service offered here? You and your team will join a Friday afternoon Zoom session and just talk about the soft-side of IT. Do I have all the answers? Of course not! These sessions are not intended to give any real answers. They're intended to provide a different and independent point of view on how to handle different scenarios or situations.