Changes and Information coming in from all direction using

Question

Background

This is a small company where i work in roughly 50 ~ 100 employee. I have several departments in my company for example Marketing Department , Financial Department, HR Department and IT Department. Myself i'm handling IT Department. I'm a new IT Manager

I found it quite messy when information such as changes , new feature request and UI changes request are coming from ALL direction. So i decided to use Kanban + Scrum . I've successfully change it to only limit the information flow to me first before anyone else in my team.

Question

My boss which sit next to my room, give task directly to my team mate ( UI designer ). Let's say wanna revise the changes for UI. Isn't that she/he should make sure i'm in the loop? I feel like the information doesn't come to me and sometimes i didn't know my team mate actually have something new on their task list.

Is this really oK? or should have a better way to remedy it?

Answer 1

The most widely used way I know of to avoid problems like this is to have a job tracking system. Then details on all jobs are always available to whoever is in charge at the various levels.

So if your boss tasked one of your people with a job, he/she would enter it into the tracking system and you would know what is happening every step of the way. All project management software comes with this sort of feature, but they're easy to make if you don't have one.

If you already have this sort of software, and you're in charge of IT, then you need to be doing some staff training to ensure your staff are using it correctly.

Daily meetings such as outlined in your comment are sufficient to keep on top of things. So in addition to that, as a manager you do need to define your role both with the team and with your boss as the first point of contact. A simple email to him/her should be enough or even a face to face meeting.

A lot of teams I know about handle this by having a team protocol, if anyone tasks them with anything, they refer the person to their immediate superior to deal with and authorise instead of getting started on it, because other duties might need to be reassigned etc,. Perhaps bring that up in the daily meeting, your team will see the obvious benefit of it. But at the end of the day you're in charge, so you can just make it a directive.

Answer 2

My boss which sit next to my room, give task directly to my team mate ( UI designer ). Let's say wanna revise the changes for UI. Isn't that she/he should make sure i'm in the loop? I feel like the information doesn't come to me and sometimes i didn't know my team mate actually have something new on their task list.

Is this really oK? or should have a better way to remedy it?

If you are the IT Manager, you need to understand all the IT requests, and need to have a handle on the tasks being worked on by everyone on your team, their available time, the overall direction of the systems, the budget, etc, etc.

If you boss goes around you and directly assigns tasks to your team, that undermines your ability to manage the overall work your team must handle. For me this is not okay.

You should talk with your boss. You should explain the problem as you see it, and try to understand the reason for going around you. You should then work together to come up with a process that works for both of you, and helps you manage your IT team correctly.

Perhaps a weekly meeting with your boss where you go through the change requests in your team's queue will suffice. Perhaps a tool where everyone (including your boss) can submit requests for consideration. Perhaps something less formal.

But it all starts with a conversation with your boss. Do that part now.