Dear Bob ... I was hired a month ago as the new head of IT for a medium-size company (the industry doesn't matter). It's one of those "desk o'death" situations you've written about in the past. Under the last two CIOs, IT was simply unable to complete projects on schedule, systems wouldn't stay up, and the help desk rarely helped anyone, because end-users never called it. Accor Dear Bob …I was hired a month ago as the new head of IT for a medium-size company (the industry doesn’t matter). It’s one of those “desk o’death” situations you’ve written about in the past. Under the last two CIOs, IT was simply unable to complete projects on schedule, systems wouldn’t stay up, and the help desk rarely helped anyone, because end-users never called it. According to your theory, I’m in an ideal situation.It sure doesn’t feel that way at the moment. While the business executives I interact with are polite enough, from a business perspective they ignore IT and instead either build their own solutions in Access or hire outside companies. I talked to the CEO about implementing a policy to forbid this. He rejected the idea cold, telling me that until IT started building a track record of completing projects and running systems decently, he’s on the side of the business leaders who ignore it. This strikes me as a trap. How am I supposed to build a track record of success when nobody will let us build a track record of any kind anymore?– Running in CirclesDear Running … If it makes you feel any better, your situation is more common than you think. There are a lot of ineffective CIOs out there. Two of them preceded you. Your job is to make sure it isn’t three in a row.So here’s what you do: Concentrate first on what the company will let you do – fix operations. CIOs shouldn’t be focusing their energy here, of course — operations is value-maintenance, not value-creation — but in order to not focus your energy on operations, you first have to get it working right.Perform a root-cause analysis. Is the problem the current operations manager? Don’t assume it is, because after two bad CIOs, it’s entirely possible the ops manager was prevented from succeeding. On the other hand, you certainly don’t want to assume the ops manager is competent. After all, the systems really are bouncing up and down and have been for a long time. So find out.Before you do anything else, take a tour. As the saying goes, even poor people can keep a house clean. In a similar way, even an underfunded operations manager can keep a data center clean and wiring closets orderly.Assuming the wiring closets don’t look like an out-of-control Italian restaurant, ask the ops manager for a 90-day plan to get everything stabilized and see what the answer is. A really good ops manager will already have one prepared, along with a price tag, and will bless you for wanting it. A pretty good one will get a credible plan to you within a few days. The end-game is this: By getting operations in order, you’ll establish yourself as someone who can make changes and get things done. That’s your first step in re-establishing the credibility of the whole department. It will give you enough leverage to take the next step, which is to take on a project for a friendly business partner. Even a small one will do, and in fact a small one would be better, since it will have a greater likelihood of success.We’re talking about something that’s no different than achieving any other long-term goal: Understand it, but don’t try to achieve it first. Quarterbacks can occasionally throw a bomb and have it caught for a touchdown, but the rest of us can’t. We have to figure out a series of achievable small goals that will get us there.– Bob ——– Technology Industry