The most senior IT employee in a small IT team of 3-4 (who does most of the advanced technical work) is leaving. 

The options now are to either hire a senior replacement or promote a mid-level resource and hire a new junior.

Or are there maybe even other options?

It is common that especially in a mid-sized company, any project with a technology component does inevitably land in the lap of the IT Leader.

In the case of a new ERP or any other far-reaching, company-wide project this could potentially take up 80% or more of the IT Leader’s time.

But it is still expected that the normal IT function keeps on delivering.

How should one approach this?

IT tends to be a very low priority for other managers in the business.

It feels like everyone expects IT to respond immediately, but when IT expects something in turn everyone is always way too busy.

This happens even when IT communicates clearly, engages 1-1 with other business leaders about their technology needs and of course delivers on all the many expectations others have of the IT function.

How then, does the IT leader get the airtime to move forward with IT's true agenda of generating more business value?

It is not uncommon that organisations buy software packages and initially only implement a fraction of the available functionality.

After deployment, business leaders often keep asking for new projects, with new budgets, instead of analyzing the full extent of what has been purchased and what else it can be leveraged for.

Considering how expensive the initial purchase was (and often continues to be due to ongoing software maintenace), this seems utterly wasteful.

How should the IT leader approach such a situation?

For South African based companies, the new Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI) is fast becoming a reality.

Consultants are driving this heavily and it seems that non-compliance could result in severe penalties for every transgression.

Your external board may even have requested that this new requirement is to become a priority on your list of governance items. IT along with your internal Audit & Risk department have been tasked to commence with this undertaking.

But how important is this really and how to approach it?

We have established regular project coordination meetings between team leads in our company and have had great success to streamline project delivery.

Should our new COO be invited to the project coordination committee (he is currently outside of it)?

Due to the role and the fact that we currently don't have a VP2 leader, should this person become the champion for other VP2 opportunities?

There are times when Murphy strikes and more than one key staff member is off at the same time - maybe even for an extended period of time.

As the IT Manager, I am the ultimate escalation and fall-back option, so I find myself fielding technical work.

But now all the strategic initiatives that have been started are in jeopardy. How do I make sure they do not grind to a halt?

As soon as the IT Leader in a mid-sized organization understands their critical role for kick-starting Digital Transformation (DX), the next question for many is: which project is a good starting point to get the ball rolling?