The value of coaching is taken for granted in sports; coaching helps make great sports men and women by giving encouragement, setting goals, providing feedback, and giving insight into situations which hold them back. Same thing with IT Coaching. A coach isn't supposed to offer direct advice; a person being coached is supposed to work out their own solution. In IT Coaching, we cheat a little by giving best-practice advice, tips, and also provide you with ready-made processes and documentation if you need it. It saves time and your effort.
Information Technology brings together complex electronic systems and people. The technology works best when it is used in a logical, planned, consistent way. Most people also work this way - while you have the auditors in(!) - then they revert to being human again and the sloppiness and scope for problems shoots right up. Coaching will identify and help you cure poor IT management, squabbling techies, CAD/Design/Finance departments who insist on being different, techno-fear, disaffection, technical experts holding organisations to ransom, and self-professed IT experts who fix one problem and create two new ones.
Technical people often come with a certain amount of baggage. They tend to be of a disposition that favours sitting in darkened rooms fiddling with unfathomable equipment, rather than developing impeccable interpersonal skills. Many technical or reliability issues can be traced to poor communication, introversion, or in rare cases, poorly developed social skills which lead to a lack of empathy with system users, fear of admitting failure, and a compulsion to feign technical knowledge where there is none. Your coach will counsel, mentor, train, and empower people in this position using a non-threatening empathic approach.
If you lack confidence, experience, or don't feel you have the technical credibility to manage IT systems or IT staff, then you need IT coaching. SignalMountain will soon have you in control of your own destiny.
How does the Coaching Process work?
You will meet with your coach four times a month for 2 hours. Your coach will initially ask you lots of general questions about you, your needs, the business, the problems you face, what has worked well, what hasn't. They will work with you to draft a plan, set goals, key performance indicators, then provide guidance and backup as you work through it. In addition to coaching meetings, your coach will be available to give advice by phone and email.
What does coaching cost?
| Interview Stage | Cost | ||
| 1 Month Coaching Pack Four 2-hour coaching sessions (includes email and phone support from your coach). | £1,000 | ||
| 1 Year Coaching pack Forty 2-hour coaching sessions | £8,000 | ||
Additional Work ...that you ask your coach to do on your behalf (documentation, presentations, assessment, etc) Per 8 Hour Day | £850 | ||
Email us and let us know what we can do for you  | |||
Additional Benefits of coaching
As part of the coaching process, SignalMountain can help you to;
- Persuade Colleagues
It's unfortunately common that people don't always accept the opinions of those with knowledge and responsibility for IT. Your coach can help add credibility to your good ideas, well-formed opinions, and business ideas.
- Discretely Assess your Current Staff
If you suspect your technical staff are working inappropriately, have poor skills, are exaggerating or misleading you, then you are probably right. Fundamentally, IT work is no different from other service-oriented work. If you're not confident that technical staff are properly skilled and are working appropriately, your coach can arrange to appraise them openly, or covertly using discrete methods.
- Appraise Technical Staff
If you are responsible for appraising IT technical staff and you are struggling, our coaches can help. We have trained appraisers from technical backgrounds who can aid assessing competencies, performance, and objective setting.
- Define an IT Strategy
An IT strategy is a document that sets out how IT is going to be used to support your business objectives. It defines the roles and responsibilities of the IT department, what systems and software will be used, how they will be used, which business areas need their IT systems improving, and what the desired outcomes are for your investment in IT. A strategy helps keep everyone focused over a long period (3-5 years) and prevents IT wandering off in its own direction through personnel changes or being dazzled by new shiny technology. Our Coaches have written IT Strategies for dozens of businesses and organisations.
Often the people we have worked with have had a good basic idea of what IT should be doing for them, but lack the confidence or technical expertise to write assertively about how to implement their ideas and what is realistically achievable. Your coach can help you to do this, do it for you, or simply give advice on where to start. If the strategy document will best serve your needs if it looks like you wrote it, we can be very discrete about gathering the information needed, and will provide the completed document unformatted and with no reference to Signal Mountain.
- Compare the benefits of Overhauling and upgrading vs Replacement of old IT Systems
Your coach will give you an objective opinion on the viability of continuing to use systems or components declared obsolete by your suppliers or technical staff. It's not unusual to find that the decisions and 'evidence' leading to systems being replaced are spurious and serve the technical or financial interests of IT Staff or suppliers rather than the needs of your business. Often, we've been able to help people achieve remarkable results with systems which were thought to be scrap.
- Carry out a Strategic review
Organisations have tended to evolve their use of Information Technology in a fairly organic way, often influenced by budget, the levels of IT expertise available, how enthusiastic senior management were, and what your competitors or peers were using. And that's fine, to an extent. However, you're probably now at the stage where your organisation can't run without IT - it's become mission critical. You're probably worried that you don't have the right budget, expectations, people, systems, or management skills to use what you have effectively. Your coach will carry out a strategic review of your business or organisation which will examine the effectiveness of IT. It will highlight areas where IT helps you, where IT is causing problems, and areas where you could use IT much more effectively.
- Understand Technical Documents and Reports
Have you commissioned a technical report, or been asked to evaluate one, and you're not confident you know what it means? Techies and suppliers seem to delight in producing deliberately unfathomable documents full of technical jargon, which often contain conclusions or recommendations which can be very difficult to verify. Your coach will translate it to English, draw diagrams, and explain technical concepts in terms you're happy with. They’ll give you an objective opinion on the conclusions, and arm you with insightful questions to ask which will quickly show up poorly thought-out work. We'll also help cure your report writers, if appropriate.
- Overcome Technical Problems
Our coaches have a vast amount of experience in fixing equipment and systems, providing work-arounds, and long-lasting solutions which will get you back in control. Often, we've been able to achieve remarkable results in situations which were thought to be hopeless or 'beyond economical repair'. Signal Mountain can fix your IT systems; servers, networks, websites, databases, application delivery, security. That's often why our customers first contact us. The reason they come back is that if the problem actually turns out to be your employees, your organisation, your boss, or a supplier, we can usually fix them, too. If the problem turns out to be you, we’ll tell you that, too (once you’ve paid our invoice). We use an empathic approach and adopt low-risk methodical methods that identify and cure problems at source, and provide fixes, solutions and plans which leave you in charge of your own destiny. We don't build ourselves into long-term solutions.
- Work Discretely
If you need a high degree of discretion, off-site meetings, weekend or late night support or a very specific approach, your coach will be happy to fit in.