This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

The hardest part of running a technology function is that almost none of it is technical.

You get promoted for being good at the work, and then spend your week on budgets, vendors, priorities and explaining to a CFO why the cloud bill went up again.

What nobody hands you with the title

A framework for deciding which projects get funded. A way to read a cloud invoice and say where the money went. Language for talking about architecture with people who will never open a terminal. A method for judging whether an AI initiative is worth starting or is somebody's enthusiasm. And a governance model, so that decisions are made once instead of re-litigated every quarter.

Most IT managers assemble these from experience over about five years. This course is the compressed version.

How it is put together

Five functions, in the order they land on you. First IT management as a business function: strategy tied to business goals, maturity assessment, a 3-5 year roadmap, infrastructure and security choices, vendors, data, and governance through ITIL, COBIT and ISO. Then the technology side: architecture and stack decisions, engineering teams, Agile and DevOps, and what scaling actually requires of the architecture.

Execution, cost and AI

Then operations, because a strategy nobody can execute is a document. Processes, operational metrics with real owners, bottlenecks, cross-functional rhythms. Then FinOps, which is the part most technology leaders wish they had learned earlier: reading cloud bills, allocation and chargeback, tagging, rightsizing, commitments, unit economics per user and per feature.

And finally AI as a managed portfolio rather than a set of experiments — prioritising by impact, feasibility and risk, build against buy against partner, data readiness, governance, ethics, and the ROI calculation you will be asked for.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals — all technology companies, where I spent a great deal of time on the other side of these conversations with IT.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Where to start if you are short on time

Take the FinOps section first. Cost is the fastest way to earn the credibility you need for everything else, and it is the one area where results show up in a single quarter. Then go back to the beginning. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.