Confessions of an IT Manager_Phil Factor

Looking Busy
First published 23 November 2008
The art of looking busy and efficient, even when one is
really just arranging one's social life, or powernapping,
is an essential skill for any IT manager.
This is the fifth in my series of hints for aspiring IT managers. Here, we tell
you how to look busy and efficient. The most important thing for an IT
manager is to look busy. In fact, it is a technique that dominates the
management of the public sector, where whole office blocks are filled with
people earnestly engaged in nothing more than sending emails to each other
full of positioning papers, strategy documents, directives and plans. Looking
busy is one of the primary skills that is required in a manager, and one looks in
vain for sage advice on this in the manuals on management that are sold in
airports. To fill a crying need, I offer the following tips.
Be creative in staggering your hours: I once knew a manager who arrived
early at the office and always was the last to leave. It impressed everyone, and
nobody seemed to realise that he, legitimately, took four hours off in the middle
of the day.
Spend your time at a PC. The PC is a wonderful invention because it is
almost impossible to detect whether the user is doing productive work or not.
An entire office can be seen bent over terminals engaged in work of mysterious