System Wrights

A former colleague sent me an email about how the latest manager of their department quit after just one week on the job.  This was in the wake of the dismissal of the former boss, a twenty plus years veteran of the corporation, and the retirement of their second, another twenty plus years veteran, shortly thereafter.  Months would pass before a new manager would be hired.

I had just left the corporation as my contract was not extended after seventeen months. In the last of the months I was assigned to a “NOC” which was really only a relabeling of the “Integrated Command Center”; an administrative group which notifies team leads when corporate systems run afoul.

While the room is filled with displays, few deliver meaniful information and are too small to read.  In my tenure I identified the lack of complete monitoring of all the one hundred and forty applications, the lack of integration of the toolsets in use, and the failure of any of the displays to provide proactive capabilities for the “NOC” team.

This situation was exacerbated by the total lack of training, nonexistent documentation of processes or procedures, dire staffing shortages, and unfinished monitoring tools of every ilk.  Further the team skillsets were groomed for responding by starting a bridge call or alert paging of a subject matter expert.  No direct intervention and remediation was allowed.

There were manual health checks going on while completion of automated health checks went unfinished.  This consumed hours of work effort daily and prevented work on remediations.  This vestigial practice also required hourly updates to upper management.

Emergency change control processes in the corporation were requiring three day prior approvals by a team of executives without any comprehensive understanding of the complex interrelationships among the technology pieces.  Their preoccupation seemed to be to prevent priority one events which adversely affected their bonuses.

I was sure the new manager had a grip on this and all the other issues within the ICC.  He was well informed as to the needs of a “NOC” and quickly became aware of the problems facing him.  Within the first week his findings and interactions with higher management caused him to rethink the “opportunity” to which he had just committed.  He promptly left the corporation.

Now I really liked the folks I worked with at that corporation’s ICC and the network teams.  I tried my best to make the work easier for them and help take up some of the load where it was possible.  When I heard of the new manager quitting just one week after arriving I sent this response to an ICC team member:

< name deleted to protect from retaliation>,
I’m afraid I may have informed the man too well. I think that the financial issues are substantial. Because everyone avoids talking money except at the very high levels, then it’s a surprise to everyone when they get down to the actual nut cutting.

The same thing is happening in places like the build area for networking where impossible expectations are raised and no resources are provided or no means are provided to accomplish the desired outcomes. Wishing in one hand and craping in the other.

Don’t despair however because cash is flowing into your pocket and they can demand their ass off but the human being can only do so much and you are not accountable for anything more than what you can do in your time. Long gone are the days where basic human respect are part and parcel of the job.

Young managements, and this company has some very young management, cannot possibly raise a reasonable expectation and carry with it the respect of those individuals actually producing the work. It is beyond them! It is far beyond them.

The old structure of corporate management hierarchy used to involve a board of directors that trusted the executives that executed upon the corporate policies and the corporate direction. Today there is no trust between the board members, the stockholders, the middle management, the chief executives, or any of those nonproducing ranks.

The modern problem is that there are very often 10 to 20 management types who don’t actually “Hands-On” make anything involved in the chain of processes that make a product or deliver a service.  They have no experience creating or making anything.  They definitely do not have the coping skills necessary for the work.

None of them is truthful about their cost to the organization nor are they willing to admit to how much of a burden they are financially upon the operation. You will even find that their cost is not even accumulated anywhere or is obscured among many other costs.

So it gets to the bottom line and when they’re trying to cook the books as they are this time of the year and address issues like the performance of the machinery that makes money, they have hidden so much and mistated so much they cannot determine how to get themselves out of the quagmire.

It is at that point they realize they do not know what actually goes on and what the cost of continuing to operate that way is going to be. They reassess what the expectation is and generally back off the amount of the expectation so that it can be accomplished with the reduced resources and the hidden liability of not knowing what anything costs.

Concurrently other middle managers raise their expectation of all of those around them and in the chain of command their demands are supported as it is necessary to the operation of the machinery or the processes. Thus the expectation grows for the actual producers in the organization while the available resources to accomplish that are reduced in order to meet financial expectations.

Good management today is measured by how well you can transfer the responsibility for something to somewhere or something else. All of this comes to roost when you finally have consumed all of your resources, all of your people, and all of your time. That is the point to which the corporation has arrived.

Fortunately you work in an area that assures that cash flows from someplace else into the corporation’s coffers. When this fails you are charged with contacting the “responsible” parties so that cash will return to the proper flow rate. This work effort will never be satisfactory in the eyes of the dysfunctional management.

If you were to accumulate metrics and telemetry to show how you are working effectively and efficiently they would dismiss it as untrustworthy information. They’re actually so dumb that they would argue with you that the sun has come up or not when they’re sitting in a different time zone.

Don’t despair however because they’re so inept they can’t even find a replacement for you. So long as you show up, put in your time, and make your effort they’ll pay you and bitch, moan, piss, and complain the entire time.

They can only withhold love and honor if it matters; does it matter to you what the **** they think?

Sadly in my experience this is prevalent everywhere. If you were to seek out other opportunities you would run into the same problem. You’ll have to work on your self-esteem through some other means than employment. You see the poor bastards you work for don’t have any self-esteem so why should you?

Do not dispare that you are somehow an enabler for these inept and incompetent pricks. They eat their young, they eat their seed, they eat all of the food and leave nothing to invest with. They can only clear-cut the forest and they have no idea about replanting it.

Other than that I’m fine. I’m sitting at home fielding phone calls for new job opportunities. It’s actually an excellent time to get all my garden ready for the summer and spring. I got all the apple trees and peach trees trimmed and already have blooms on the apple trees. I will very soon have that pickup truck that I’ve been working on so long ready to go and drive down the street. I even went so far as to remove the blackout curtains from my bedroom because I no longer need to sleep in the daytime having worked all night to keep things running there.

Tell everyone I’m thinking about them. I hope the best for them. Please keep me posted. Pass around my contact information please. I have managed to misplace my cell phone yesterday so I’ll be finding that then I can be reached by phone 480-382-6720. It is a Google voice number and it will ring all of my phones and take voice mail.

Bernie