Managing IT Operations in a Small Business: Tips to Make Your Life Easier
It’s better to work smarter rather than harder, especially when the two roads take you to the same place. In many cases, that holds true for managing IT operations. For small businesses, maintaining and stabilizing infrastructure can keep you up at night especially when you lack the time and resources to gain control of your IT.
Regain your composure with these helpful small business IT management powered by the industry experts at ThrottleNet:
Make managing IT operations easier by understanding how everything works from a technology standpoint. For a small e-commerce company, a single transaction can cross 35 different technology systems, and those systems all need to be managed and accounted for. Review your technology and if necessary, start from scratch with a leaner, more effective system to simplify managing IT operations.
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and that is especially true in managing IT operations. If you have an internal IT team, empower them to use their expertise to make key decisions and solve problems. By encouraging creativity, your team will be that much more effective.
IT professionals often get backlogged by focusing on unnecessary or redundant projects. Instead, use your most valuable resources in a way that generates revenue for your company. Always have realistic expectations of your team members when managing IT operations.
Micromanaging IT operations can cause delays, especially if you’re less of an IT expert than those doing the work. You hire an IT team or a third party because they have the expertise to solve problems you may not fully understand. If you find yourself second-guessing your team, take baby steps to build up trust.
Panic when managing IT operations is extremely detrimental to performance, and on-the-spot decision making tends to create more problems than it solves. You’ll sleep much easier knowing that you have an action plan built to handle any crisis and that a small issue is much less likely to turn into much larger problems down the road.
A large chunk of your IT operations workload can be automated, and there’s no excuse to forgo using some degree of automation to make the day-to-day easier for your organization. Sending out network alerts, scheduling updates and rebooting machines can all be automated, allowing key contributors to focus on more important tasks.
