On Management

If all you had were model employees, you'd not become a good manager.

That's what my director, an excellent manager told me as we left the meeting with HR where we'd decided that, due to recent events, we were going to fire an employee who had been with us for a relatively short period of time. I'm not being sarcastic, My director is excellent at management. He's one of the most reasonable, laid back, professional managers I've ever had. It has certainly cemented my opinion of the training given to naval officers.

One of his stated goals is to "help me build my resumee" by giving me the chance that other entry level supervisors don't usually get: starting and staffing a new internal organization. This has proven to be a significant challenge for me. I have had to break some of my bad habits, adjust to the new- not insignificant- levels of stress in my day to day work life, and reschedule some of my technical goals so that I can work in new management training.

The relatively frequent and usefull one-on-one meetings that I have with him help me to outline priorities and provide guidance and direction.

This weeks' guidance came in two sections the management section and the technical section.

First, the management section-

My current role is very unique: I'm considered the "deployment scientist" which means I am involved in most of the deployments if there are significant technical challenges as well as being the system administration supervisor. What we've discovered is that the conjunction of both roles means that my inherent 'management by walking around' style has a positive effect on finishing projects... ie: when I walk over and ask "How're things going?" I often hear, "while you're here, we're having this problem..." sometimes I know the answer, sometimes I can reason/examine my way into the answer, and sometimes I'm just plain stumped. Our other discovery is that we don't really have much control over how technology is being implemented and monitored. As I've been taking more of the mantle of a technical manager, things have started to come together: we're getting a little better at using the our physical resources and we've started to be more effective at deploying our staff to better solve problems. We still have a long way to go, but the folding our organization into the IT department (thus my current director, who is the director of IT) was a very good decision... The IT department is a small-but-tight ship.

We've started to tighten the group up- previously we (the deployment/customer system administration) team had our own resources to track licenses and the IT department was tracking them in a more diffuse fashion. We recently shuffled our resource over to an IT manager and she's now covering the entire company's licensing, rather than just ours. This makes the Finance guy in me happy, because it's a more productive use of those labor hours. It also means that we can close the gap between our organizations and begin to crosstrain on certain weak areas in both teams.

Then the technical section-

Long and short was: I needn't put all of my technical training on hold in order to do the management training. In fact, I need to put my training plan together soon so that it can be reviewed and the budget allocated. I've long wanted to become an H-P CSA in HP-UX and I also need some additional training on configuring SANs. These two items are both relevant and will make their way into the plan, to be sure.