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June 19, 2014 By PM Dom

Evaluating IT Performance

Following is a process to evaluate an IT department. Similar to project management, I find that many organizations fail at some of the basics.

  1. Hardware
    • Inventory all hardware, particularly servers and their purpose (many companies don’t know what they own)
  2. Software
    • Inventory software and their purpose (look for “shadow apps”  – apps that people have been installed locally – these pose a greater security threat)
  3. Network
    • Document network architecture (vulnerabilities are easier to spot if the architecture is documented)
  4. Information Security
    • Review status of routers, firewalls, firmware updates, anti-virus software and other equipment designed for security (companies struggle to keep up with the latest versions of security devices and software)
    • Hire a company to evaluate (hack) you to determine vulnerabilities
  5. Projects
    • Document the purpose and status of every project (status of projects is likely to be worse than commonly believed)
    • Align projects to strategy (some won’t align to your strategy and should be terminated)
    • Evaluate business value for each project
  6. Help Desk
    • Review help desk statistics (software is better and people are smarter – help desk requests should be trending downwards)
  7. Disaster Recovery
    • Review the results of the latest DR test (many companies fall behind on DR testing and they fail to make changes based on the results)
    • Review the restore process (the business is frequently unaware of how long it will take to restore certain operations in a disaster)
  8. Organization
    • Review the org structure and the people in leadership roles
  9. Processes
    • Evaluate common processes for effectiveness (PM processes, security, backups, help desk, etc.)
  10. Process Improvement
    • Review the regular status reports that are used to measure and manage IT (ensure IT is measuring things that are important – not just things that are easy to measure)

 

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