5 Steps to Improve Performance and Save Your Job

Welcome to the toughest "do more with less" year in memory.  Chances are your boss will expect improved application performance while axing your group's budget.  And you're probably on edge about keeping your job.  Here are 5 steps to improve performance so you can keep your job--and who knows--maybe even buck the trend and get a raise.

1. Do Less

Here is the secret to doing more with less--do fewer things, but make sure what you do makes a big difference.  Time is the one resource that is just not fungible.  Look at the time you spent on work tasks last year, and compare that to the time spent by the guy a few cubicles away who just got riffed.  Will you be expected do what you did plus what he did?  OK, so he was not as smart as you--but still, there are only 24 hours in a day!  Furthermore, infrastructure will age, resources will not get replenished as needed, and stuff happens that will eat your time.  Cut your losses.  Evaluate all the tasks you do and decide which ones you can drop without hurting daily production needs.  The next steps will help you identify what to focus on and what to ditch.

2. Define a Performance Management Strategy

This is not as hard as it sounds.  We are not talking about doing a big study or adopting some fancy framework.  All you need to do is define overall performance objectives and processes essential to delivering good service.  You probably have most of the processes in place but could deliver them more efficiently.  Clearly define and document them so anyone in the group can do them. 

3. Follow Performance Management Best Practices

We have written extensively about the 4 performance management best practices: Understand, Measure, Communicate, and Link.  They seem obvious, but unless you do all of them all the time you are not doing them well.  The beauty of these best practices is: A) they cost nothing to implement; and B) our research proves that when done consistently, they improve application performance more than anything else you can do.  We can't emphasize this enough--best practices are the most effective way to improve performance, and they are FREE!

4. Shift from Infrastructure to Transaction Management

Look at the processes and tools devoted to infrastructure management versus keeping your application transactions (or flows) running well.  You should have a healthy balance.  You are probably heavy on infrastructure and light on transaction management.  With the tanking economy and the push for cheaper ways to operate IT, your company will be tempted to shift infrastructure into the cloud or outsource it.  This means you will need more transaction management and less infrastructure management capability.  Start that management shift in advance.  Don't add infrastructure processes and tools if you think you will not own the infrastructure.

5. Replace Tools and Don't Add More

You will doubtless be tempted to buy a new, better tool to help manage application performance this year.  Vet the purchase using the guidance in the previous steps, and if that justifies a new tool then buy it. But seriously consider tossing an old tool as you add the new one.  Why?  Because our research shows that an optimal number of tool vendors yields the best performance results.  More is not better, and you are probably already above the optimal number.  Adding yet another vendor with the associated training, process definition, and integration involved will cost you time you don't have, thus breaking rule number one!  However, if you jettison another tool and the associated maintenance, processes, support labor, etc., you will not increase and probably will save precious time.

Finally, do these five things now!  Do not wait for the roof to cave in on you.  Act fast and stay ahead of the changes coming at you in 2009.

• Network Management
• Application Performance Management
• best practices
• job security