Today was a good day for me, my generic script is almost complete – all the error reporting and logging works and even closer to the point it does what it says on the tin! Now as a systems admin working on some fairly complex systems, I’ve followed a simple way of working. Just try and do most things the easiest way possible, where you find that something is fit for purpose – just keep it going if you can.
This alass doesn’t seem to be the way that our new project manager (relocation manager) works, if it’s working then we should hack it around until it doesn’t work anymore seems to be his philosophy. You may think that I’m being a little unkind here, but the truth is that you’d be well off the mark. I’ve worked in the IT world for over 30 years, in that time I’ve worked with some outstanding people and (sadly) quite a few people who wouldn’t recognise a computer system if it fell on them! Now the job that I do isn’t very difficult most of the time, but there are certain demands placed on me – and I understand what they are. My time, which is paid for by someone is valuable. However my experience (which is what I sell) is worth a significant amount more than my time, the experience bit only comes with – well experience!
As a systems administrator, working on a contract basis – you are expected to deliver. Now it isn’t always possible to deliver the exact solution required and this is where the experience bit comes into play, as long as the soultion is fit for purpose then no problem – however when you start working towards one goal only to find that when you hit it the other goal is the one that you should have been aiming at – life starts to become a little frustrating. The project I’m working on id being managed by email, I’l like to be complementary about that but I can’t’.
The most recent request made by the Newest Muppet on the block is that he removes around 25% of team resource and has direct control of it himself, this demonstrates just how short sighted he really is from my perspective. The team is made up of a number of contract and permanent staff, when this period of work is over the permanent staff will be left to manage and maintain the systems and the contractors will have moved on. This is the way of the IT world now, it’s probably going to go stay that way for a while – so removing people who have an ongoing roll seems to be a little short in the planning side. The project is moving forward without the requirement for splitting the team and the permanent staff are fully involved, in fact I’ll be taking some of them through the aspects of the first deployment tomorrow. So the informatoin is being cascaded down, just from a PM managers point of view it isn’t. This from a person whe tells us that it’s important to stick to the plan, but in actual fact doesn’t have any kind of a plan.
So I’m getting frustrated, for many reasons. But the plan is still a secret plan and we can’t see it so adhereing to it can be a little difficult. Especially when the Newest Muppet on the block, has set his sights on fullfilling the project plan. You know the one that we haven’t heard of, but want’s to do the whole thing via email. this can make for problems when trying to get between two adjascent systems and means that the email may already be out of date. As it’s had to go from one desk to it’s neighbour, via our mail servers in Germany.
Still, the managemnt of the project had some problems which have now been resolved, the only outstanding parts of the job are all of it. But these guys seem to be prepared for snatching disaster from the jaws of total success, if nothing else they seem to be consistent. It’ll be interesting to see how this progresses over the next few months and if the newest Muppet in town can continue to bollox it all up!