Welcome to IT Leaders. My name is David McKean and I founded the company after 10 years as an IT director and CIO. I have worked with over 2,000 delegates from 1,000 organizations across 50 countries, running courses from the US to Singapore, from the U.A.E. to Vietnam.<\/p>\n
Whilst I learnt a lot during my time in the IT hot seat, it is the experiences of delegates and clients that keep the courses relevant. Our IT network has over 10,000 IT professionals and we regularly poll them to understand the industry priorities. In addition, we keep abreast of current leadership and management thinking with extensive research to ensure that the courses stay up-to-date, compelling and valuable for those wishing to further their IT careers.<\/p>\n
We have learnt a lot since we ran our first course nearly 20 years ago. For example, IT management and IT leadership courses are different to IT technical courses. Nearly always, our delegates will have some experience of some of the topics \u2013 just not the same one. Some may be very familiar with IT operations, for example, some with project delivery and others with planning. But when we come together, it makes for an excellent opportunity to share experiences and fill in the gaps of what we don\u2019t know. As the course director, I can tell you that no two courses have ever been the same.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, to be successful, IT management and IT leadership courses also need to address industry specific topics. You cannot take a general management and leadership course and stick the word IT in front. There are many specifics that IT managers need to understand that other executives don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
For example, business strategy is concerned with products and markets, revenue growth and new business opportunities. IT not only needs to understand these top level priorities but also those from the individual departments. And after that, combine them into a plan with agreed funding and a manageable timeline. Even at a high level, it is a complex job with many moving parts.<\/p>\n
As a further example, IT is at the heart of all business change and it is typically IT that organizes the projects, makes sure activities get done, but ultimately it is the business owner who is responsible. That in turn means strong diplomatic skills to ensure that business owners step up to their obligations without damaging relationships or causing friction.<\/p>\n
Our average feedback score is 90%, a very high figure for soft skills training, where many managers won\u2019t give 100% on principle. \u201cThere is always room for improvement, David.\u201d Delegates have repeatedly told us that they gain huge value from discussing IT management issues with other IT management delegates, and not compete for air time with other executives.<\/p>\n
Our IT Management and IT Leadership courses are targeted at IT professionals, typically with between 5 and 40 years of experience (IT or otherwise). We have delegates from a full spectrum of organizations, from finance, professional services, oil and gas, government, charities, manufacturing, technology and many others. Most client organizations have anywhere from one IT manager to 1,000, and based all over the world. Our delegates have the widest range of job descriptions, from IT directors, senior programmers, heads of infrastructure, systems architecture. We tend not to have many CIOs from major blue chip organizations, but it is fair to say that IT professionals with pretty much any other role from the world of IT have been on our courses.<\/p>\n
IT Leaders runs just two courses, originally based on the two books I wrote, namely Excellent IT Management and Excellent IT Leadership. The courses are run as 5-day classroom course using the excellent facilities at Greenlands, an ideal location in Henley on Thames right on the river Thames in the UK. The on-line courses have been extensively updated for 2025. We also run in-house courses from time to time.<\/p>\n
Each of the courses has 5 modules.<\/p>\n
IT Management<\/p>\n
The IT Management Course has 5 modules as follows:<\/p>\n
Business & IT Strategy
\nDeveloping IT strategy and aligning it to the business \u2013 this module uses a simple and proven process to build strategy. It examines how businesses develop strategy at the top level and how IT can take this input and the departmental priorities to create an effective, optimized plan that is also mitigated against business and IT risks.<\/p>\n
Advanced project management principles
\nThis module looks at what makes a successful project leader \u2013 not just vague generalities such as \u201ccommunicate more\u201d but using practical and specific actions that make a difference. Our list has been built over 10 years using the collective experience of the past delegates. We also cover business change leadership, advanced risk management and project portfolio management.<\/p>\n
Operational excellence
\nWe look at several topics including IT operational frameworks including ITIL and DevOps and ten ways to improve your IT operational performance. We look at how to implement improvements and how to foster a culture of continual service improvement.<\/p>\n
Crisis Management
\nWhether we like it or not, most day to day crises centre around the IT systems, whether it is an outage, or a cyber attack or any of a host of other potential problems. There are two sides to crisis management \u2013 reduce the likelihood of something going wrong, and having good systems to contain the situation and restore service as soon as possible when they do. This module looks to share experiences from previous and current delegates to identify ways to improve with case studies and examples of best practice.<\/p>\n
Commercial Management
\nOur fifth module is commercial management for IT. As IT managers, we never question that all our vendor partners have had extensive negotiation training. Whereas, our polls suggest that only 30% of our IT managers have had any formal negotiation training, putting us at a significant disadvantage. And whilst they may not be at the heart of commercial negotiations very often, it is a valuable management skill for many situations – for example, discussing budgets, or prioritizing project requirements and limiting scope. We also cover techniques for how to get the most from your vendor and some high-level IT legal \/ IT contract concepts so you can help the legal and procurement teams secure effective and robust contracts.<\/p>\n
IT Leadership<\/p>\n
The IT Leadership Course has 5 key modules, as follows:<\/p>\n
Personal Leadership
\nThis is our name for managing yourself. It includes understanding how we spend our time, how we could improve it, emotional intelligence and leadership opportunities to build our influence, leadership and success. We also present our \u201cWhat Makes A CIO\u201d research.<\/p>\n
Peer Leadership
\nThis module includes how we build influence around the organization, how we build strong people networks, how to manage our managers and how to understand and manage corporate politics. We look at different personality types, essentially how different people look at situations in different ways, and then how to best work with and influence them.<\/p>\n
Team Leadership
\nThis module uses our model of IT teams which consists of at three levels of performance for the team itself, as well as understanding why high performing IT teams may not be considered as such by senior managers and peers outside IT. We look at team essentials, such as hiring, managing performance and the SFIA model with relation to specific IT roles. We look at team dynamics, how to foster team spirit, maximize performance and advanced coaching techniques.<\/p>\n
Technology and Innovation
\nIT managers have a hugely important role to play in fostering innovation in their organization. Almost all of today\u2019s innovations have IT and \/ or technology at their heart. This module looks at how to set up an innovation framework, techniques for developing innovation ideas, how to provide an environment for innovation experimentation and how to measure the results. We use an AI case study to identify opportunities for innovation.<\/p>\n
Corporate Governance
\nThis is our term for technology leadership at the highest level. We present our proven model for aligning IT to the business, and how to set up effective IT governance. We re-examine the behaviours of successful CIOs and IT leaders. We conclude with an open forum to discuss IT leadership issues and our lessons learnt from the week, summarizing key actions to take forward.<\/p>\n","url":"https:\/\/www.itleaders.co.uk\/","url_text":"itleaders.co.uk","main_services":"IT Management Training","image_1":"https:\/\/diib.com\/featuredmembers\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/itleaders1.jpg","client_review":"","why_we":"","history":"","image_2":false,"image_3":false},"yoast_head":"\n