IT does a ton of work to support a company.  We make sure billing systems accurately charge clients.  We make sure our HR systems pay everyone properly, and we make sure our websites are up and accurate.  All of these things are incredibly complex challenges that require a great deal of expertise and skills to manage successfully.  Despite of all this work, however, IT is generally perceived as a reactive function; we just sit around waiting until someone reports a problem to us.

Certainly some part of our function is reactive… we do, after all, have a help desk and support portal to solicit tickets.  There will always be some portion of our work that is reactive, we cannot, after all, be everywhere at once.  There will always be SOME challenge that pops up in an area we don’t have eyes on.  Just because a small percentage of our work necessitates reactivity, we shouldn’t accept only being reactive.. Indeed, there is a LOT to gain from doing the opposite, from being proactive.

Being proactive means a number of different things in tech.  Most importantly it means letting others know that something is going on.  Being in IT means we get an advanced view of how the systems are operating.  We get dashboards, alerts and reports that most folks don’t get… and even if they DID get them they wouldn’t necessarily understand what they mean.  This makes proactive communication the single most important thing we can do to increase out impact.

I take this lesson to heart and make alerting folks one of the first things I do when I find a problem.  (The only step I would take before this would be to stop the immediate bleeding to help minimize the impact of the problem).  This have a number of advantages:

• Get ahead of the problem - Letting folks know about a problem before they find it helps prevent the wave of “OMG XYZ thing broke, help!” emails/calls/slacks/visits/telepathic messages that will come once folks realize there’s a problem.  Your email just saved god knows how many tickets.

• Builds partnerships - This is an important one!  By showing your partners that you’re actively watching out for them you build trust.

• Rallies the troops - Proactive alerts also let’s your team know that somethings happening.  This gets more eyes on the problem, and helps solve the challenge more quickly.  It can also help tap into other teams sooner since they’re now aware of the issue.

The good news about being proactive is it doesn’t take much effort… a few sentences describing what you discovered and that you’re looking into it goes a LONG way to avoiding an escalation.