I usually work at the end of the year, but this year my vacation and personal time slipped by, so I found myself having to take the last week of the year off. It's funny that even though you're off work you still think about it. 

One of my preoccupations during this time off has been setting our goals for the new year. You can do this anytime during the year, but I've found the end of the year is the best time to focus on this. We have system change moratoriums and most of our higher priority projects are finished. 

We had a very successful 2007, but we've found ourselves being challenged to do more with less. This leads to the initial period of planning how to do the same things and then possibly restating SLAs based on resource constraints. Luckily, our business is growing, so our customers keep us very focused on daily IT support.

These are the five new year resolutions I hope to keep in 2008:

Documentation: 2007 saw a huge growth in our documentation efforts. Spurred by the development of our wiki, we were able to begin the process of documenting everything. There is one area that we haven't focus enough on and that is process documentation. 

We've been very aggressive in ensuring the nuts and bolts are documented. You want to figure out how to fix an ACD issue? Documented. You want to see the process used to handle software distribution issues? Undocumented. Process documentation is an investment of time, though. Whereas one of us can pound out a simple list of things to do to fix an issue, a process document needs to include information from other groups. It's critical to have this documentation, though.  

Better vacation planning: As I said, I didn't use all my vacation time. This led to issues with multiple people with overlapping responsibilities being out at the same time. For instance, the person who usually handles things while I am out is out right now. This can lead to customer confusion and a neglect of priorities. 

To handle this in 2008 I am going to make sure the vacation schedule for all our sites is documented and that a weekly review occurs. I don't want to move to a formalized vacation request process, as I think that removes the collaborative nature of the process. Constant vigilance and review will help us.  

We have a section on the wiki devoted to this, so all it'll take is a little more fleshing out and we should be good to go. 

Days without system issues: Prior to my leaving on vacation we had an issue where we accidentally deleted a critical program off a workstation. This is a program where only one license exists and we lost the original CD. Luckily we found the original CD, but it did lead to downtime. This got me thinking we need to track how many times our personal, local mistakes cause outage minutes. I am still fleshing this one out.

The inspiration came from the worksite updates you see where they say, "XX days without an accident." 

Tighter customer integration: The nature of my position changed at the end of the year and I will be much more customer facing. One of the things I quickly realized was the customer interaction and understanding I thought was happening wasn't. While we were still handling all issues in a timely manner, I can only assume we missed opportunities to leverage our skills with the business teams. 

We need to get back to focus on this and helping the business managers meet their goals.  

Aligning centralized support: In today's IT support world centralized support can be a bad phrase. Many of the constant frustration some corporate IT managers have is do to this. We've been very productive when it comes to working with centralized support, but I think we can do a better job aligning our goals with theirs. Yes, sometimes they will be divergent, but I think with some work we can hammer out some common ground. 

2008 is going to be a great year for our team, so I am hoping we can capture the moment of the end of 2007 and move us forward.