What Is an IT Operations Manager?: Responsibilities, Skills Required, and Challenges Faced

Helpful Summary

• Overview: The article explains the role of an IT operations manager, who is essential for overseeing IT infrastructure, managing teams, and efficiently running systems. 
• Why you can trust us: We’ve successfully supported organizations like Philo and Railway by providing monitoring tools that help them improve system reliability and automate many processes. 
• Why it matters: An IT operations manager minimizes downtime, secures systems, and aligns with business goals, to achieve operational success. 
• Action points: Consider implementing tools like Instatus to monitor system performance and maintain transparent communication with customers during downtimes.
• Further research: Explore how IT operations managers at leading companies like Netflix ensure system resilience and what tools they use.

Having an IT Operations Manager for Your Team Is Important

Think of how complicated your current system is, from everyday technology like cellphones and laptops to complex server configurations and applications. Without someone overseeing how these systems run and interact with each other, you’d be left with a real mess and nothing would work. 

Thankfully, you likely have an information technology (IT) department overseeing everything. They design, develop, install, maintain, and implement the systems you rely on. If you don’t have an IT operations manager overseeing your systems, keep reading this Instatus guide.

You will learn what an IT manager is, what skills they can bring to your business, their responsibilities, and the common challenges they face.  

Let’s get started!

Why Listen to Us?

We've directly supported organizations like Philo, Restream, and Railway in enhancing their DevOps workflows. By automating IT processes such as website monitoring, status page creation, and incident management, we’ve ensured seamless operations for these companies.

These solutions have minimized downtime, streamlined communication during incidents, and improved overall efficiency. Instatus employs IT operations managers and relies on their expertise; expertise we’re now sharing with you to help keep your systems reliable and secure. 

What Is an IT Operations Manager?

Let’s kick off this discussion with the basics. IT operations managers play a pivotal role in your IT department and the entire team. They oversee the infrastructure and core operations that keep your IT systems running smoothly.  

They are often in charge of a team of IT professionals, who all work together to ensure your servers, networks, and technology are reliable, efficient, and secure. An IT operations manager often balances daily maintenance with long-term operational planning. 

An IT operations manager is an expert in minimizing system downtime, optimizing IT processes, and aligning the IT infrastructure with the overall goals of your business. 

The IT Operations Manager in Action

Let’s use a real-life example to illustrate the benefits of hiring an IT operations manager. Vidyard, a client of Instatus, creates software to host and analyze video performance. 

Vidyard’s IT operations managers use and implement our tool to provide real-time updates on system performance and downtime. Through the status page, they communicate clear and concise information to users, ensuring transparency during outages. In this example, the IT operations manager balances both the technical challenge and also the public-facing challenge. 

Instatus helps the company maintain trust with its users by promptly alerting them about issues, offering detailed progress updates, and showcasing resolved incidents, minimizing uncertainty and enhancing user experience.

Here’s how Vidyard’s status page created with Instatus looks like: 

Which Key Skills Show Up On an IT Operations Manager Job Description

Let’s find out what the main responsibilities of an IT operations manager are. 

1. Building and Managing Relationships With Technology Partners and Service Providers

IT operations managers build and manage relationships with the company’s technology partners and service providers. This involves negotiating contracts, managing service level agreements (SLAs), and ensuring that services meet the company’s needs. 

An IT operations manager also acts as a liaison between the company and its service providers to make sure issues are resolved quickly, and that their services align with the company’s vision and goals. 

2. Maintaining the Security of IT Systems

An IT operations manager is often always busy but should spend much of their time maintaining the security of the company’s IT system. This includes implementing stringent security measures to protect systems against cyber threats, managing firewalls, and ensuring that the latest security patches and updates are applied to all systems. 

They must also regularly review and update the company’s security policies to address emerging threats and ensure compliance with industry standards.

3. Team Management

IT operations managers must have interpersonal skills so they can manage the IT team and ensure everyone is successful in their roles. Team management includes task delegation, training, and collaboration. 

At times, they may also be tasked to find and recruit new team members, carry out performance evaluations, and address issues within the team.

4. Ensuring Compliance with Policies and Regulations

Compliance is an essential aspect of IT operations. The manager should ensure all IT systems and processes comply entirely with both internal company policies and external regulations. This constitutes regularly reviewing systems and processes to ensure compliance with legal requirements such as data protection laws and industry-specific regulations. 

In addition, they also perform a key role in ensuring that the company’s IT practices are transparent and auditable.

5. Overseeing Communication with Customers

An IT operations manager oversees the communication systems that the company uses to interact with its customers. This includes managing email servers, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and other communication platforms and tools. 

IT operations managers ensure these systems are functioning properly and that any issues are addressed promptly to maintain a seamless customer experience.

For instance, the company may use tools like ours, Instatus, to efficiently manage communications with customers during downtime or when they want to know if your systems are operational. Instatus has a proven track record of successfully providing its clients with efficient solutions to streamline the monitoring process of their digital assets.

6. Guaranteeing System Uptime and Reliability

As the head of the IT department, the IT operations manager is responsible for ensuring system uptime and reliability by using tools such as Instatus. 

Instatus provides real-time status pages that help businesses keep their customers informed about the operational status of their services. An IT operations manager would use Instatus to monitor system performance, detect issues before they impact users, and communicate transparently with customers during downtime. This proactive approach helps maintain customer trust and reduces the impact of any service disruptions.

Skills Required for an IT Operations Manager

What skills should you look for when interviewing prospective IT operations managers?

Leadership Skills

An IT operations manager is mostly a leadership position. You’ll want to look for skills such as clear goal setting, understanding how to motivate a team to their full potential, delegating tasks, collaborating, and providing direction to individuals and groups. 

Conflict management is also an important skill for a leader such as an IT operations manager to have. They will have to address conflicts between team members while also balancing the impact of this conflict on the company. Ideally, they should resolve disputes with minimal impact on your IT department.

Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving Skills

These skills help an IT operations manager understand and digest complex data, identify trends, and pinpoint solutions to optimize their team’s performance. This involves data interpretation using various perspectives, having a clear understanding of the root causes, and arriving at decisions that match the goals of the company. 

They must also interpret and explain complex technical language and systems to team members who are not too well-versed with technical stuff. 

Project Management Skills

An efficient IT operations manager isn’t just a leader and a problem solver. They must also be able to plan, organize, and execute tasks in a timely and efficient manner. 

Here are some of the project management skills required: 

• Setting deadlines
• Strategic goal-setting
• Resource allocation
• Troubleshooting issues

Beyond this, you also need to stay up to date with technological developments in the IT industry to maintain your company’s operations at a high level.

Technical Know-How and Proficiency

IT operations managers must obviously have a strong knowledge of various operating systems, networks, and IT security measures. Since they help the IT department troubleshoot issues, the IT operations manager must have a deep understanding of how these systems work and how to provide technical support. 

They should know how to set up and configure servers, networks, and other hardware or software in the quickest possible time. With technical proficiency, an IT operations manager can ensure systems work well and are secure from external threats. 

Challenges Faced by IT Operations Managers

The day-to-day responsibilities of IT operations managers often change and new challenges crop up often. Here are the most common challenges IT operations managers must deal with. 

1. Lack of Resources

Not having the proper resources can take a toll on your business. IT operations managers must ensure all resources are available the moment they are needed. This ensures operational efficiency all the time, no matter what the problems are. 

2. The Evolution of Your Tech Stack

The technology and IT infrastructure used by your company is rarely static. There are constant changes and updates to the applications and tools used every day. The IT operations manager must keep pace with the latest innovations to ensure minimal incidents and downtime. Any unavoidable changes must be made in a way that doesn’t negatively impact the business. 

3. Internal and External Threats

Keeping your system safe is a responsibility that falls on the shoulders of the IT operations manager. They must secure your system from internal and external threats. Is the data backed up? Are proper access controls in place?

Sometimes, IT operations managers may need to tap a dedicated security team who will monitor and secure the IT infrastructure, and implement security procedures to keep threats at bay. Additionally, the IT infrastructure must also be updated with the latest security patches. 

4. Expensive IT Tools

Adding new members to the IT team, investing in new solutions, and incorporating new resources are inevitable and sometimes expensive. The IT operations manager must be skilled in cost control and finding the right resources within the provided budget. 

When you need a cost-efficient tool that will let you build status pages for your customers, look no further than Instatus. Our tool will let you get started for free, giving you access to unlimited teammates and subscribers. When you need to upscale, the costs of subscriptions are affordable. 

5. Downtime

Downtime is a critical challenge for IT operations managers, leading to service disruptions, lost revenue, and damaged reputations. Communicating with users is important while resolving these issues, in order to maintain customer trust and for full transparency with users. 

Our tool offers a solution by providing real-time status pages, keeping customers informed during outages, and minimizing their frustration.

Here’s what a status page with Instatus can look like:

How To Overcome the Challenges

Here are some proven tips to overcome the challenges we just discussed:

• Automate as much as possible: Automate tasks that usually require manual labor to reduce downtime and enhance efficiency. Instatus can be integrated with Uptime Robot to automate your status page.
• Use IT monitoring tools: Monitor your IT environment to discover potential issues before they worsen.
• Implement a DevOps approach: This approach manages complex IT environments by automating processes and integrating various teams. DevOps can also help automate software development and IT operations processes.
• Build and carry out a strong security strategy: A strong security strategy involves carrying out security controls and procedures, monitoring the environment for threats, and addressing incidents.
• Optimize your IT resources: Streamline your procedures, use data and analytics, and automate your tasks. 

Conclusion

The role of an IT operations manager is vital in an organization. They handle numerous important responsibilities, from managing relationships with technology partners to making sure you have the technical proficiencies needed. They also address significant challenges that can pop up daily.  

At some point, they will be tasked to handle service disruptions. In these instances, Instatus can help. With our tool, you can effortlessly keep your customers informed and updated during downtimes – a reflection of your efficiency as an IT operations manager. 

Try Instatus for free today.