Is your thinking impeding your progress? This is a significant problem for an individual and a much more serious one if you’re in charge of an IT department.

As a consultant, I see a lot of organizations and people. I often encounter situations where I can’t help but feel that an IT department could be a runaway success within its organization if it weren’t for the beliefs their leader seems to hold. I want to share with you a small collection of such limiting beliefs.

1: The business should identify its technology needs

Think about this very carefully: Who is more valuable to you — someone who knows how to tighten a bolt or someone who knows which bolt to tighten? We’re a knowledge economy and knowing what to do is much more valuable than being able to follow instructions.

If you believe that the onus is on the business to identify technology needs, you’re wrong. You need the business to identify business issues, opportunities, and priorities, and then you and your people have to come up with a way of addressing them from the technology perspective. (Better still, you can elevate your personal positioning by delving deeper into the business content and strategy, but that’s a different story.) You and your department are the experts in technology, not the CFO or the Director of Marketing. If you see your department’s raison d’etre as merely implementing and maintaining the technology that business chooses, you position yourself as the guy who tightens bolts. IT departments that fall into this trap get outsourced.

2: We are a fast-paced organization

I have yet to discover an environment that doesn’t claim to be fast-paced. I no longer know what that means. What’s important, though, is how this assertion impacts the people within. If you’re told for a while that you’re incredibly busy, you tend to start believing that it must be so, and your capacity decreases. If you’re told that there’s no time to think, you tend to sacrifice quality of decisions for the sake of speed, even though there may be plenty of time to plan and execute. The net result is an organization with a high rate of project failures, too focused on firefighting and too “busy” to think strategically and identify work that’s truly important.

You can never be too busy for the important stuff if you get your priorities right.

3: We are under-resourced

This is a universal excuse, and I’ve met plenty of IT executives who resort to it. It happens in organizations where there are staff members who can’t coherently explain what they do, where there are 10 project managers for every project, where every trivial thing involves days of meetings, and where out of every 10 projects going at any time, eight have no business value.

You can never have enough time, staff, or money if your priority system is out of order. The key is in using the resources you have in such a way that they produce the best ROI possible.

Read the entire article at TechRepublic.