We have created a new Pan European team!

Over the past few days we have been working with my European colleagues, we have worked with them before – once here in the UK and once in Europe. We have in the past tried to manage some of our work by email, before our first face to face work shop – this was not really a good solution. But after our first two day workshop, we did indeed start to make significant progress. Our second workshop was also a great success we completed the tasks we had to complete and provided great value, based on what evidence the sceptical may say. Well the email phase had taken six months nearly and we had achieved very little in reality, the workshops took a total of six days and we managed to do more during the workshops than we did in the previous six months.

It’s not to say that everything was easy, there were many issues that had to be resolved and in order to do this we have had to do a lot of investigation and testing. But the consensus at the end of the three days was that we had had an other excellent workshop. The way forward here seems to be obvious, the momentum established with these first three workshops should be kept going – but this decision lies with management! In order for the work and collaborative effort to be worth while, decisions have to be made – unfortunately this is not a strong point with the management.

On a lighter note, the workshop has generated sufficient momentum for us to have decided on a name for one of our teams. This is an unusual team in that new team members have to prove themselves, something that several people can do only too well. The name for the team is “The Pan European Oops Team!”, membership is not by invitation – it has to be earned. To gain entry to the team you have to have what we have started to call an “Oops moment”, to explain a little when a systems administrator is working on a live Unix server one of the things that you don’t want to hear him say is “Oops”. For the people here who are not systems administrators I’ll explain a little, “Oops” translates very well to “Oh F*** why did I do that!” This is generally followed up by the self same systems admin asking for the restore tapes, or they may ask “What is the DR strategy for this machine!” – alternatively they may phone you from a foreign country and then tell you they have had a small problem.

As anyone who reads this site will be aware, the award for an Oops moment used to be the Sombrero – well now it would seem that we need either a bulk purchase of Sombreros or a specially designed Oops award I’m in favour of the latter for the new Pan European Oops Team – with the award being given to the person who has the most Oops moments in a year.