An excellent Technology Operations shop rarely gets the plaudits it deserves because of the many ways in which even a one-time foul up, act of God or just sheer bad luck can tarnish the department’s reputation.

Here are 12 put downs you don’t want to hear even if disguised by corporate speak.

1. Your Technology Operations are so outage prone, your company is on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. BRAND
2. Your Technology Operations are so bad, hundreds / thousands of employees have frequent unscheduled 90 minute coffee breaks due to outages. QUALITY
3. Your technology Operations are so bad, Development went and got 50 servers in one day from AWS for 1/10 the cost! [Long Delivery times and / or High costs] NIMBLENESS
4. Your IT Operations are so bad, your IT ticket backlog has a backlog! [Management and Service Quality] NIMBLENESS
5. Your IT Operations are so bad, everyone goes to AWS to get a server! [Lack of Alignment / Strategy]
6. Your Technology Operations cost structure is so fixed, you can lose all your customers and can only cut the Technology Operations budget by 10%. [High Fixed Costs Structure] ECONOMICS
7. Your Technology Operations are so mismanaged, you can’t even tell who is using your infrastructure and even where it is! [Asset / Inventory / Performance / Capacity Management]
8. Your IT Operations are so bad, to order a few tablets for my department requires 15 pages of business requirements, 3 purchase requisitions, installation of MDM and MAM software, put on 3 layers of passwords that expire every 30 minutes, and promise not to take any pictures or videos with it and you give me a six-week delivery date NIMBLENESS  OR Your IT Operations are so bad, I ordered a tablet and they said NO and give me a laptop @ 2x the price. ECONOMICS
9. Your Release Methodology and quality are so bad, the applications/systems/services/websites don’t come back when you said they would, you broke what used to work and the new stuff you were supposed to deliver doesn’t work! [QUALITY]
10. Your IT Operations are so bad, you’re still running Windows XP!  [“Currentness”] INTERNAL BRAND
11. Your Technology Operations are so bad, there is no data, good or bad, to refute it! [Lack of Metrics / SLM]
12. Your Technology Operations was so bad, the company went out of business when someone fat fingered and accidentally deleted the customer database. [Disaster Recovery, Crisis Management and Data Protection]
    

Though written a bit tongue in cheek, these are definitely painful words to hear. Lack of attention or an unmasterful  remediation from the top Technology / IT Operations Executive of these items may result in an invitation for his / her replacement. For many organizations, whispers of just one or two of the above is enough to have CEOs, CTOs, CMOs, and CIOs question their Technology Operations leads.  At the end of the day, you have to protect the company’s Brand/Customers/Revenue, watch your economics, partner with the business, be nimble and responsive and have a strong management by metrics capability.

[Author’s Note: This was the original thought/style for my first blog, but I lengthened it,  expanded on each item, made it into 11 blog posts and it became the 10 Landmines to Dismantle series. This one was much more fun to write though! I was going to call it The Dozens for IT Operations, but most executives may not have heard about the vernacular and origins of the Dozens – Mike]