[Closed] Presentation at Interview

Small teams usually leads to multitasking and priority setting as everyone has to do more than one task.

Also contingency / succession type planning - what if Brian leaves/gets signed off for 6 weeks for an operation, who knows what he's working on and who can pick it up?

Communication - regular tracking and meetings with both your stakeholders so you know their (changing) priorities and your team so everyone knows broadly what each other is doing.

Not trying to be funny. but you are going for a job as 'Head of IT' and you can't think of what sort of challenges that position may entail?

At a technical level - moving from on-premise to cloud-based IT Services is the main game changer at the moment, the challenge being making sure any adoption of the cloud aligns with business requirements and getting the IT team skilled in it (obviously within the OS much is the same, it's the cloud layer around it you need to learn).

At a generic challenge level - IT budgets are generally shrinking yet 'new' legislation like GDPR puts even more demands on IT departments, keeping the team motivated, covering shift support hours can be a challenge with a small team

Can't help you out much without knowing what industry you're in.

If you were in a tech company, I'd look at what competitors are doing, what market advantages they have compared to my product and talk about that.

I'd also check out what reviews for my company were like on sites like Glassdoor, and maybe Payscale data too. Maybe there are some conclusions to be drawn there about company culture, maybe morale as well?

What is the industry as a whole tending to do? In my industry, there is a trend towards automation. You can't linearly scale headcount while scaling the business so you have to automate. Unfortunately. finding people with the right skills is difficult. Maybe you can identify skills that are in demand for your team and speak on how you'd develop/teach them to your team.

Small teams in themselves are not a bad thing. How workloads are managed is what's important. Is there a disciplined work intake process, or is it more informal (e.g: Agile/Kanban vs "my manager told me to do this so I'm dropping everything else and doing it"? Is there a single point of failure in the team? Maybe you're unlucky enough to work with some obsolete tech and all of the knowledge about it is stuck in a single team members' head. How will you deal with that? What's turnover like? How would the loss of a team member affect you?

Good luck.

EDIT: I think @johndoh is being a little bit harsh. Sometimes you have to YOLO an application and see if you can do the job. It's low risk, and if you've got an interview then chances are they think you have the skill. It's whether you can come across as competent during the interview which matters. Oh, and don't forget an interview is a 2 way thing.

Dealing with unexpected system downtime

Dealing with brute force attacks

Dealing with employees downloading unauthorised software which compromises systems

Oh and the biggest challenge in IT? Getting people to do decent documentation - I still haven't cracked this one (although being guilty of producing crap/incomplete documentation is one of my sins which doesn't help).

Surely ISO 270xxxx must feature?

That’s a solid base to focus on, then set the interviewers beard on fire 🔥

With a small team, people often need to wear "different hats". One of the challenges this can bring is when some people are reluctant to do so. Not one for the presentation but highly likely to be a question afterwards. I've recently been through quite a few interviews and questions on managing challenging staff always seems to come up.

Again with a small team how are you going to ensure that everyone is multiskilled? As theotherjonv says, contingency is a key thing when managing a small team.

As Head of IT, will you be managing everyone directly or is there an organisational structure below you?

Communication is key! At the focal point for IT you will need to make sure that you keep everyone in the loop but also will be expected to know everything IT* related that is going on in the business.

What is the support department to client ratio? If it's a small team supporting a large user base then this in itself brings challenges.

Also useful to have examples to hand of how you have done things differently. Specific examples for when you have shown initiative.

Good luck! I hate presentations for interview with a passion. Always try to plan well in advance but the creative juices flow best when under pressure so I'll end up writing it the night before!

@johndoh, I knew I would get at least one response like that. I can think of plenty of generic challenges but was trying to avoid going in with a list of challenges that the department has already overcome. I guess this is unavoidable without having some insight into the department.

Not IT, but I manage a small team, challenges are:

Consistency of service. How do you maintain the right level of support and service when people are off sick/on holiday/in meetings/not in the office.

Flexible working. There is a drive towards flexible working in the workplace, how will you adapt working practices to allow this? If the answer is "you won't", how do you deal with the star performer who's about to return from maturity leave but only wants 30 hours per week?

Work load. How do you deal with a situation where 1 person has shed loads of work and the other very little?

Variety of work. Do you nurture a team of specialists (only work on 1 thing and get really good at it, challenge around allocation of work when something in their area doesn't come in, could get bored due to lack of variety) or a team of generalists (easy to (re)allocate work, lots of variety, but end up with Jacks of all and Masters of none).

Communication. What is the best way to communicate with the team, drawbacks, posties (e-mail, in writing, more come back, less personal. Face to face, more personal, more impact, can be denied it happened).

That'll do for a start I guess!

Sorry, wasn't trying to be an arse but clearly succeeded. 🙁

Thanks all for the tips, its already got me past my mental block.

Working with small teams is where I will focus my effort, Its the only concrete thing I know about the it department at the company. I also have plenty of experience of this and so can draw on examples from my past during the presentation.

STW wins again.

@johndoh.

No problem. It would be a step up for me so I have no direct experience in a "Head of" role. So I guess I was trying to think of specific challenges to that type of role.

Thanks to the posts from others, I have now turned my attention to an area I have direct experience and something I can talk to at length and also give real world examples.

Keeping a small team interested and motivated.

BAU/ops stuff needs doing but is tedious, project work is more stimulating so strike a balance, people like a bit of professional development / training every now and again.

I think I see four themes - the technical bit - keeping services running and what have you, managing the team, managing the customers, and engaging at corporate level.

The shift from managing to 'head of' might come with a need for a different view of company politics - how will you balance doing the right thing from a technical perspective with following a politically viable course of action?  Similarly you might (depending on circumstance) need to consider adherance to a corporate line that is unpaletable to those further down the tree (a policy, or poor practice that's tolerated?)

good luck

I ask people to do presentations all the time at interviews. There are lots of things being tested here, it is not just the content, but your ability to communicate it succinctly and be an engaging speaker, without boring your audience to tears.

My top tips:

keep it short, don't go over the ten minutes
make sure it is accessible for the HR drone if any are present
give the panel a one page nicely laid out summary of what you are saying
keep it short, and don't get bogged down in detail

Good luck, and remember, treat that ten minutes as an upper limit, not a starting point !

(make sure you have enough one page summaries for all the panel !! this gives the HR drone something shiny to keep them interested)

HR drone...

LOL at that.

Agree with hels, I too often ask for presentation at interview and, yes the content is important, but also make sure it's engaging, well researched and well reasoned. I'm often more interested in that than actual content.

+1 to it being a chance to show you can communicate, i don't think they're looking for you to re-engineer the department completely in <10 minutes.

"Working with small teams is where I will focus my effort, Its the only concrete thing I know about the it department at the company. I also have plenty of experience of this and so can draw on examples from my past during the presentation."

Well, it's only a ten minute presentation, so it'll be over before you know it.

However, I'd avoid taking a narrow "small teams" approach and limiting my scope to problems faced by small teams. I'd take a wider approach, but relate it to small teams. That may be what you meant anyway.

Note: a drone is not somebody that works away without thinking. That's a worker. Drones do nothing but shag the queen. P G Wodehouse knew that when he named Bertie's club the Drones Club.

Shadow IT and the trade off between security (of the infrastructure, data, PII) and usability (how people use/access the systems and their ease of use, how they do their daily jobs).

Actually, GDPR is a good one. If you store personal data, it will hit you, so a challenge would be becoming GDPR ready by the time the regulations become enforced and how to do it would be everything from assessment of systems and data to compensating controls, enforement and education.

"The job is “Head of IT”.

Surly if you are going for a Head of IT job you know what the issues are ??

I like doing presentations for interview as it gives you the chance to set the agenda and show that you can research and prepare for something.

Content is important, but as Hels says that's not all they're interested in. Try to be relaxed and engaging and even throw a couple of gags in (but make it look off-the-cuff).

One thing I'd add - do you have the opportunity to enquire as to what challenges they may be facing? Ask if they're doing anything particular like changing all the servers or migrating everything to the cloud (for example) over the next 12 months. Asking shows you are taking the task seriously and using your initiative IMO.

Good luck.

I wonder if there's a recent  case study you might use.  For example if a new version of a previously stable forum which only suffered from few minor niggles,was launched with insufficient testing causing mayhem and anger among its user base.

Head of IT = get a hard working deputy and WFH/golf course most of the time. Unless it's Head of IT in a school, which from other people's experiences I've heard about sounds like my idea of hell.

Unless it’s Head of IT in a school, which from other people’s experiences I’ve heard about sounds like my idea of hell.</span>

Oooops.

tell me more

Watch old episodes of the IT Crowd for tips and embed some clips in your pressie?

If you want a case study, how about cryptolocker and the NHS? Makes the case for a solid backup schedule and the challenge that is user education (or lack thereof) in clicking on random documents.

Lots of info on the costs of the outbreaks (Maesk's was a shit-tonne)

Also, good luck.

Resistant stakeholders are always a challenge. And for That you need a shared vision to take them on your journey. What is that vision? **** knows.

"What challenges do you think you may face".   Speechwriting seems an obvious answer.

"and how would you overcome these?" - with the aid of a random set of strangers on a cycling website?

Sounds good to me.

@FuzzyWuzzy     care to elaborate on the education comment?

As head of IT, does that mean you will get a set-up that includes two or more monitors at the same time? Because if so, I imagine it must be a challenge to manage *minesweeper, facebook, and STW all at the same time.

*other games may exist

challenges: fixing the forum or is job not at STW towers

try and make it job/industry relevant. failing that just harp on about GDPR and big data

I have worked in private sector education managing the infrastructure for a number of schools. It's no more heaven or hell than most other places. You'll still have budget constraints, the network performance will never be good enough, the equipment supplied will be "crap, why don't we use {insert alternative manufacturer here}". The usual stuff basically. The added spice will be little Tyson or Princess Chardonnay destroying equipment on a regular basis with little to no sanction and you being expected to repair / replace without resorting to spending money. Or anything illegal.

Oh and if you are in education don't expect training or career development. You are not a core part of the business and they will expect you to "increase efficiency" year on year, aka increase service whilst reducing cost.

I have a few ideas I’ll post when I get home.