[clue-talk] Management and Positions of Power: Fewer IT professional and Engineers?

[Nate Duehr]

rex evans wrote:

> A counter argument: 
> "The Lead-techy should take care of this".
> 
> The Lead-techy is quite often very busy with
> the substance of the project, and he may only have
> time to raise a red-flag, "It might not take the
> load."
>  
> When the manager has no more technical knowledge 
> than the man-on-the-street, L-tech may not have 
> time to explain, explore, translate, justify, prove
> his position.
> If the L-tech took this time, the project might surely
> fail, 
> so he raises the flag, and goes back to work on the
> project.
> 
> Have you guys ever been there and done that?

About once a month.

There's another Subject Matter Expert above me in our organizational 
structure, so the Lead Techs fire the red flags at him.  He oversees the 
red flags and both jumps in to assist to try to avert them and also 
starts the communication process with whatever the managers need to know.

(There are different SME's for different product lines.)

My manager will then contact me for details or pull both the SME and 
myself in for a quick chat to determine the level of risk, knowing that 
if the SME sent it to him, it's already headed for nightmare levels of 
badness.

:-)

It's actually a pretty workable system except during these events:

1. SME is overloaded.  Too many red flag critical items in a week, and 
someone's getting shuffled off his plate that week and into next.  He 
usually chooses correctly who needs to be ignored.  Frustrating for us 
senior techs, but time has proven we can trust him.  And we'll usually 
still alert management that it's a developing problem, but there won't 
be any bandwidth to handle it that week.  And we'll keep working on it 
on our own.

2. Senior techs are out, junior techs don't send the red flag to the 
SME.  We handle this by specifically stating which senior techs are 
covering the other folks when they're out of the office for any reason. 
  We take the other guy/gal's meetings both internal and external, 
everything.

3. Notification of SME is too slow -- usually only happens in MAJOR 
outages where Senior tech doesn't have more than five minutes to avoid 
serious financial disaster for a customer.  (An example would be the 
complete power failure at a major facility and the customer wants 
assistance NOW in having more hands to log into equipment and attempt to 
shut it down safely before battery power is lost.)  We usually handle 
this by simply hollering... seriously.  Holler at another senior 
account's tech with that "oh shit" look in your eye, and they know to 
just go physically find the SME and drag his butt to your desk. 
Sometimes we'll go drag the manager over bodily also.

I guess you could call the SME a "Lead Tech" of sorts, but really 
they're highly specialized in our organization.  Where as the "Senior" 
techs are assigned to specific customers, and required to know all the 
technologies and services offered to that customers, the SME is assigned 
to oversee the big "fires" that any "Senior" tech is working, and 
projects aimed at stopping those types of fires from happening ever again.

Nate