

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Manager's Path" by Camille Fournier. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What does strategic management look like in information technology? When you’re managing an engineering team, how can you plan for success?
Strategic management of information technology involves learning how to prioritize projects, divide tasks, and foresee future challenges. A manager must plan engineering strategy with business goals in mind.
Read on to learn strategic technology management skills in engineering.
Planning Engineering Strategy in Early Management Roles
The first skill that you need in the strategic management of information technology is how to select projects for your team. Part of this responsibility is turning down projects that would overwhelm your team or stop them from completing their other tasks. Fournier says engineering managers often have to turn down projects when their superiors—for instance, the company’s owner or board of directors—lack technological knowledge and therefore propose unrealistic projects.
(Shortform note: Turning down unrealistic and overwhelming tasks is economically and personally important, one study says. Overworked employees are less productive, have worse physical and mental health, and struggle to manage their lives outside of work. This is relevant to you in strategic technology management, as over 20% of people in computer and mathematical science work over 40 hours a week, on average, while almost 15% work over 45 hours a week. Turning down unrealistic and overwhelming tasks can ensure that your team members don’t follow this pattern and instead work a healthy and productive number of hours.)
Fournier discusses a couple of important elements of deciding when to turn down a project:
1. Understand how much work your team can reasonably complete. Your team won’t be 100% focused on completing new projects all the time. Make sure you factor time for other activities—such as meetings and system maintenance—into your scheduling so you can accurately assess whether your team can accept a new project.
(Shortform note: You may struggle to factor these activities into your team’s schedule if you consider them less important than your team’s engineering-related projects. Some business experts say that less important tasks are easy to neglect because our brains forget information we don’t consider important, making room for what we do consider important. You can better remember these tasks by forming associations and triggering reminders. For instance, you may classify meetings and system maintenance as “administrative” and then schedule a daily block of time to complete administrative tasks. Then, whenever you look at your schedule, you’ll see that block of time and remember all the tasks you’ve put under the administrative heading. Strategic management of information technology requires you to prioritize administrative tasks as well as engineering tasks.)
2. Figure out what you can cut from your projects. Sometimes, you’ll be able to partially accept a new project: You can complete it, but only if you cut some features or deadlines from the new project or your existing projects. Thus, you need to know which elements of your new and existing projects are truly necessary and which are less important. If you can’t cut anything, you’ll have to turn the new project down.
Engineering Strategy: Avoiding Ineffective Projects Other software experts add that you might have to turn down projects from your superiors because they’re ineffective, as well as potentially unrealistic. Software is often used to automate company processes, letting computers handle simple tasks while employees focus on more important ones. However, this kind of automation (called robotic process automation or RPA) only works with simple, fixed processes. Automating complex or unstable processes wastes time and resources, as your team must constantly fix errors and update the software. Fournier focuses on how you can handle problematic projects as a part of strategic technology management, accepting, editing, or turning them down as they’re requested. In contrast, these software experts recommend a companywide solution: People from the engineering department should be involved in the initial decisions on which processes to automate (which projects to request, in Fournier’s framing) along with the company’s top leadership. That way, they can ensure that all projects are effective (and, arguably, realistic) before the request is sent to individual teams, instead of negotiating and altering the project afterward. |
Strategic Planning of Information Technology as a Senior Manager or Director
As you’re promoted and your responsibilities grow, prioritization becomes increasingly important to the planning process. Fournier says it’s easy to neglect some responsibilities once you reach these levels because you’re so busy. Prioritization ensures you complete the most important tasks, so if you do run out of time, only minor tasks go unfinished.
To prioritize, focus on completing tasks that are both urgent and important. Urgent tasks must be addressed immediately, whereas important tasks are essential parts of your job but are often overlooked because they’re less time-sensitive than urgent tasks. You can have tasks that are both urgent and important, either one, or neither. Strategic planning of information technology requires that you differentiate between projects that can be done now and projects that can be done in the future.

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- Why software engineering management is such a difficult field
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- How to climb the six rungs of the engineering management career ladder