How to prevent IT department overload

Computerworld - Not long ago, IT consultant Mark A. Gilmore was called in to help an IT department that was struggling with project overload. "They'd gotten this kind of attitude -- the executive vice president calls it 'Burger King Syndrome,'" he recalls. "Their approach was, 'You can have it your way.'"

The business executives believed IT could supply whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it. Salespeople had gotten into the habit of asking the development team to create applications within a week to fulfill promises they'd made to customers. As a result, IT employees were spending about 80% of their time reacting to crises or struggling to meet impossible deadlines rather than calmly planning their workloads, says Gilmore, president of Wired Integrations in San Jose.

In the meantime, basic technology improvements weren't getting done. For example, Gilmore was surprised to discover that, though the company had a large data center with several hundred servers, there was almost no virtualization.

"You can't operate that way because it creates chaos," he says. "The quality of the work gets degraded. People's happiness level gets degraded, and it becomes a miserable environment."

Unfortunately, this very situation has become the norm in many IT departments. "It turns out to be a chronic problem," says Gartner analyst Robert Handler, who notes that his firm's research suggests that at least one-third of funded technology projects are currently in a backlog, waiting for IT to start on them. That's not a good sign, he says -- especially since there's strong evidence that overloaded IT professionals are measurably less productive than ones with reasonable workloads.

An improving economy is probably to blame for the added strain. In Computerworld's Forecast 2013 survey, 43% of respondents said they expected their IT budgets to rise this year, up from 36% last year. Sixty-four percent anticipated making a major IT investment. At the same time, 59% reported that containing costs was a priority. In the real world, that translates into a growing number of projects flowing through IT departments whose staffing levels have remained flat.

"Over the years, there had been pretty steady improvement, with backlogs going down and developer productivity going up," Handler says. "The most plausible explanation is that the credit collapse of 2008 led to companies stopping everything they possibly could." In 2010, he notes, IT productivity again began to slip, leading him to suspect techies were once again getting overloaded. Sure enough: "We started looking at other data sources and saw backlogs building up," Handler says. Piling more and more work onto IT is like pouring too much water into a funnel, he says: It works for a while, but then "all of a sudden there's too much and it makes a big mess."