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Free up your help desk
Help desk techs spend a lot of time fixing the same obvious problems. The more no-brainer stuff you take off their plates, the more time they can spend on real dilemmas. For example, every two weeks, Richard Casselberry, director of IT operations for networking vendor Enterasys, meets with his internal help desk department to review the questions they get and brainstorm solutions. One quick fix: Increase the number of incorrect passwords users are allowed before they’re prevented from logging onto the network. By boosting failed attempts from 3 to 12, Enterasys was able to slash help desk calls for password resets without adversely affecting security.

Stop micromanaging
If you can’t get your work done each day, there’s a good chance it’s because you’re busy doing someone else’s job, says Chaco Consulting’s Rick Brenner. Inexperienced managers in particular are often guilty of taking their old jobs along with them to their new assignments, which leads to micromanaging and a host of other problems. Stepping in and doing the job for your reports only makes the problem worse, Brenner adds. The key is teaching your staff the skills they need to stand on their own. That may require outside training, allocating more resources, or finding ways to reward productive workers without necessarily promoting them into management. “A lot of IT managers tend not to delegate, either because they’re control freaks or they think no one else can do it as well as they can,” says Brendan Courtney, vice president for Spherion, a $2 billion staffing and recruiting firm. “They also tend to not hire people they perceive might be better than them. What they don’t realize is that if they hire people who are better and delegate authority, it will further their own careers.”

Think strategy, not tactics
“Most IT organizations are reactionary to some degree, and some are very reactionary,” Kirchner says. A good measure as to whether an IT department is reactionary or visionary is how often its top IT execs must leave meetings to deal with production problems or other emergencies. “The more often an organization’s leaders have to put out fires, the less mature it is.”

And of course: the productivity killers to note:

The Hero: Instantly fixing problems may be gratifying and earn you kudos, but it can backfire in the long run. “It is not always okay — or productive—to drop everything and solve any customer issue that comes up when it comes up,” says the Forsythe Group’s Chuck Kirchner. “It results in a reactive culture and creates long-term productivity issues.”

The Juggler: Some organizations believe it’s better to start a lot of projects at the same time to achieve “parallelism,” Brenner says. But high project count leads to productivity losses as people constantly switch gears. “We do better when we focus our resources,” he says.