Every summer Formula 1 takes a break from the ‘circus’ with a two-week enforced factory shutdown. The teams are not allowed to work in the factory or on the cars. It gives everyone the chance to sit back and relax from the first half of the year. What it also does is give the teams, engineers, principals, managers and drivers time to think about how they are going to approach the rest of the year. How are they going to get the next 1/10 of a second out of that wing? How are they going to manage the pit stop strategies as they go to places notorious for dynamic weather patterns, for instance the last race at Spa. These are the types of questions that they are thinking about, planning for and waiting to act upon.
This time can also be an opportunity for you as an IT professional to look back and reassess how the first half of your year has gone. During these last few days of summer you can take a break too, just like Formula 1 teams, and spend it planning — either how to improve the resources you have now or to move on to a better resource, which helps to sharpen and make more effective your team’s resources.
Here are some questions you may want to consider when reassessing your IT goals for the rest of the year:
- Do you have any budget left you could use before the close of the year?
- If so, what projects are at the top of your list?
- Have you met all of your planned data needs? Where are you at with capacity to support more data/media on your current servers/hardware?
- Have your customers been complaining about slow performance or dropped sessions with your applications/website? How can you improve? Is it time to add web acceleration technologies?
- Do you have upcoming seasonal needs? Is it time to try out the cloud to avoid capital expenditures?
- What can you do to make the rest of your year more productive?
These are just a few ideas to get you thinking as summer comes to a close. What other things are you considering as we enter the last few months of 2012?
