Playing Politics in it --

Playing Politics in IT -- Toolkit?

Playing Politics in IT -- A Value Assessment

The term "politics" is a very loaded one with many connotations throughout organizations. Yet in the context of any IT directors' or managers' job, they must seek to serve others to gain their cooperation. They must give to get; reciprocity is so critical to their roles it should be written into their job descriptions. Consider how critical the role of the IT director or manager is to an entire organization. They must not only keep their entire staff focused on the internal customers who need their support to get to strategic and tactical objectives of an organization, they must also keep their department focused on the external environment as well. Balancing these two perspectives is critical for an entire IT department to keep the needs of who they serve in perspective. The urgent need of a sales person to have a new application developed for example takes on entirely different significance when IT realizes that sales is trying to beat a competitor on a major deal. Politics comes into play in the prioritization of the project, the team assigned to complete the project, and the amount of visibility given to the internal customer, which in this example is the sales department. For IT directors and managers to be effective they need to collaborate with the sales managers to figure out how best to meet their needs as efficiently as possible. Politics in this context is the ability to keep all other internal customers' expectations met or exceeded while also meeting the urgent needs of sales, for example. This balancing act is a more realistic and less cynical view of politics in IT departments. If all this sounds daunting, keeping expectations balanced, it is. Politics is critical for the role of IT directors and managers as they seek to simultaneously serve the needs of many different internal customers who are all under pressure from competitive and market forces to do their jobs.