IT projects are often fraught with problems that make them seem doomed, but IT leaders owe it to their teams to provide coaching and encouragement even in the face of trouble, suggests Jonathan Feldman, director of IT for a North Carolina municipality. 

Feldman recounts in a post at InformationWeek an incident that happened to him many years ago, when his staff told him one day that a process error had resulted in lost user data. The document management system kept copies of very old documents on optical media rather than hard drives, and his team used a manual process for backing up the optical platters. It looked like the platter with the data in question had been erased.

"In my mind, I was writing the memorandum to accompany my professional suicide at that organization," Feldman recalls. 

While he wanted to admit defeat, some on his team were determined to persist in finding a solution. The optical platter was sent to a specialist in data recovery, which returned a report with a note indicating that the platter hadn't ever been used.

"That statement went unnoticed for a day until our light bulb moment: The platter had been mislabeled. Further review indicated that the real platter was mislabeled as a blank platter, and all of a sudden, our data wasn't gone at all," he writes. 

The lesson learned--aside from the virtues of automated processes--was that it is important not to give up in the face of seemingly hopeless situations. "The thing that separates great IT teams from average ones is often their persistence," he writes. "And that mental toughness must start at the top--the ability to keep on trucking through potentially catastrophic events in order to deliver good IT outcomes from bad ones."

For more:
- check out Jonathan Feldman's post at InformationWeek

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