A Peculiar Little Management Tip

UPDATE: Upon some further reflection, I realized that this little tip really applies to all organizations... marketing, sales, etc.  The key is to abstract away from the individual. Please read on with that in mind and you'll get what I mean.

If you have an I.T. team, ask the head of the department the following question:

"When you sign up for vendor accounts, notification lists and the like, what email address do you use?"

If you're like most organizations, you'll find that the answer is "I use mine!", or "We use the email of [insert individual employee here]."

This may not seem like that big of a deal, but ask yourself ... what happens if that employee leaves? Or changes roles? Or you want a new person responsible for a particular technology or responsibility in the future?

...and suddenly there are complications. And complications means many lost hours in productivity, delays in getting support during critical outages, lack of awareness around expiration of software licenses or security updates and more.

And this is something I have had to fix for almost every client we have taken on, so by statistics alone, I can almost guarantee you have this problem.

I could go on and on about this, but in brief... make sure you have a policy that all registrations for vendors, notification lists, etc. are sent to an email distribution list, and never to the email of any given individual. Then you can add the individuals responsible to the distribution list. They will still get the notifications, still be able to login to vendor accounts, etc., but if and when the responsibility changes, you can easily slide a new resource into the role by adding them to the list and removing the original responsible party.

You can just create a single I.T. distribution list- perhaps something like "itnotify@yourcompany.com", and use that universally- a significant step for most organizations. For a more advanced approach, however, you can create separate aliases for each vendor and tie them to that distribution list, and then later on can break them off into their own separate distribution lists when and if you need to spread responsibility around. So, "VMware@yourcompany.com" and "Verizon@yourcompany.com" can initially go to "itnotify@yourcompany.com", but later on when you break off managing telcos to a different individual, you can remove the Verizon alias and replace it with a distribution list.

Easy!

All it takes to get started is an awareness of the problem, a little bit of policy work, and a few minutes creating distribution lists.  And if you do it now, while your I.T. head is still here, you can have them move everything over to the new address now, so that way you don't have to worry about it in the future If/when they decide to leave.