How much do you pay for technical support and information technology related staff? Regardless of the amount, its probably not what it should be. It is certainly possible that you aren't paying enough, but equally likely you are paying too much, or just not getting as much as you should for that price. This is particularly true for small businesses.

If you want to get the most out of your IT dollar, there are three simple things you can do right now.

Waste Not Want Not

Are you wasting valuable IT funds? Are you sure? How many hours does your highly paid in-house developer spend doing menial help desk work that someone else could do just as well for half as much? Still sure?

Don't waste valuable staff's time. Its easy to ask the brightest tech around a question, but its usually overkill. Would you pay the engineer who designed your car six figures to change its oil? High-skill personnel should always be working on high-skill tasks. Anything less is a waste of their time and your money. When you have a problem, aim for the minimum skills necessary to solve the problem properly.

To this end, many small businesses can employ fully-staffed IT departments on a part-time basis. If you only have part-time needs for your prize tech's skills, only hire him part-time. If you still need full-time tech support, higher an additional support-only person to fill in the gap. Even if you only need an additional person to cover for the lack of more skilled personnel a limited amount of hours per week, consider hiring him full-time anyway. Every minute the lower-paid staff works for you is a minute the higher-paid staff can work on higher-yield tasks.

Have a Plan

Many aspects of business are reactive. If you are getting more phone calls than you can handle, then you add a receptionist to answer them. Many areas of IT work this way too, but not all of them. As soon as anyone above the lowest levels of your technical staff has to ask what to do, you are loosing money.

If you hire or outsource for a specific reason, make sure that reason, and a plan of attack, are well-known to both you and the person or people you bring in. In may cases, you will need to develop this plan with your new hire. This is fine. The goal is to make sure that during every minute of every day, every tech in your company knows exactly what he or she should be doing. If you have multiple projects, either let the tech decide how to multi-task or clearly define what should be worked on at any given moment.

It is also important to know that quite a few techs (and creative people as well) either work in over-drive, or not at all. This isn't really something you can manage and is nothing that can be blamed on an individual; but it is important to be aware of it, as well as methods to counter the downsides. When someone gets truly focused, the pace and quality of their work can astound you, but the moment they get bored, you have a human lawn ornament in your office. If your techs always have something to do, and perhaps more importantly, something different to do if they get bored with their immediate project, the more likely you are to increase the number of over-drive hours you get.

IT is Different

Information technology is not just some other department in your company. Techs are not just other staff. While they aren't any better, they certainly are different. If you want your IT department to improve, manage an IT department, not marketing, human resources, or anything else.

Good IT personnel can be very puzzling to managers who aren't familiar with them. They can also be puzzling to managers who are experienced in IT management. Understanding your techs, their needs, and how to best manage them is critical if you expect to get all you can out of your IT staff.

For example, to a manager with a human resources background, frequent changes in employment from a tech may seem like a bad sign. While it most likely is, it doesn't necessarily mean it is the tech that is bad. The best and brightest techs get bored the fastest. If the work isn't interesting enough, or if they aren't appreciated enough, they will move on.

With all this said, most successful techs can self-mange quite well. Even if a tech's management skills aren't great, it may be better to let them stumble than to constantly interrupt them. There are few things worse than interrupting a marathon programming session that came out of a tech being "in the zone" for a meeting that could have just been summarized later.

Conclusion

Regardless of the size of your company or your IT staff, make sure you handle it carefully – and correctly. Don't waste valuable staff's time, always make sure there is something to do and everyone is clear as to what that is, and finally, always treat techs as techs, taking great care to keep their differences in mind at all times. If you do, you'll get what you paid for.