Have you been inflicted with March Madness?  You know, the temporary insanity experienced during the month of March brought about by the NCAA Division I championship college basketball tournament?  Symptoms include excessive basketball talk, trash talking your team’s opponent, making up fantasy brackets, betting, and some are even said to experience productivity loss in the workplace due to streaming the game on their computers.

Some say loss in work productivity during March Madness is just a myth — no big deal.  According to Clay Herbert of the Washington Post, instead of avoiding March Madness, companies should embrace it.

Herbert also pointed out that instead of your IT department going mad trying to figure out why office workstations are moving at a snail’s pace, an organization should just designate a room where the game is being shown on a large screen TV and workers can just bring their laptops to that area.

IT problems

As mentioned above, employees streaming the game can really affect the productivity of the whole office.  This could greatly take its toll on your IT team, trying to figure out what the hell is going on and how to fix the “problem.”

Tips and Tricks

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To help your IT team deal with March Madness, Zoho Corporation president Raj Sabhlok provided some tips as to how IT administrators could manage the insanity.  Here’s Sabhlok’s tips with a SiliconANGLE twist.”

Use real-time monitoring tools – even before Madness, IT departments should already be using these tools.  Aside from monitoring your network, it helps ITs identify problems such as bandwidth hogs.

Generate and view reports – It doesn’t stop with just using a tool to monitor the network.  IT’s should be able to pull reports based on the tools they use and be able to analyze the reports in real-time.  This would help them quickly identify network disruptions.

Impose an effective mobile device management strategy – BYOD is widely practiced in workplaces nowadays and this has been an IT’s worst nightmare.  Personal devices used in workplaces can easily compromise the network.  By setting standards for mobile devices used in the office, limiting what files can be accessed and setting bandwidth limit for the device, IT departments can rest assured that employees won’t be able to abuse the network.

Set limits and alerts – Employees can be a real pain in the ass for ITs.  If you don’t give them what they want, they won’t stop complaining.  If you do give them want they want, some tend to abuse it.  The best approach for this is to keep things balanced.  You give them what they want, like access to personal apps aside from work apps while at work, but you set a bandwidth limit for the personal apps to the works apps won’t suffer.  And of course, set an alarm for when an employee goes over the bandwidth limit.  This way, you can easily pinpoint who’s causing the disruption.

Set some rules – As mentioned earlier, IT departments should be able to give what employees what they want without compromising how the company runs.  If something goes bad or an employee violates bandwidth restrictions, IT administrators should be able to determine what is happening in real-time and be able to solve it quickly as well.  Also, violators can have their BYOD privilege temporarily suspended or revoked to teach them a lesson.