Having recently taken over the support on some the servers that used to be looked after by our European colleagues, it was noted that the handover was a little piece meal. However prior to the actual hand over of the support we enjoyed a kind of honeymoon period. As I have stated before the person in the systems admin team that makes a mistake, generally wins ownership of a sombrero until someone else manages to take it from them. However as we knew that there would be some language issues and that there was a general lack of familiarity with the applications – the award was in the main suspended when dealing with these servers. Over the past few months there have been some minor problems with the support of the servers in Europe, in the main there haven’t been any significant technical problems – however there have been some. No the main problem would seem to revolve around communication, not related to a language difference – but just a simple lack of it!
The title of this post when translated says “I think I should be measured for a Sombrero.” I thought that this would be a suitable title, however there have been some further developments in this support scenario. Now in order to bring people up to speed with the system that was inherited, it was a simple monitoring system with the following rules. Green is good, Yellow is not so good and Red is bad. You’d think that a system like that is about as simple as it gets, it would be if the alerts mean what they say and there was no ambiguity. As a result of the communication problems that have been experienced, the situation with our European colleagues has turned into one where we have a them and us situation.
The honeymoon period is most certainly over, there have been several incidents and each has caused concerns, our European colleagues seem to expect us to fail – they also seem to be prepared to participate (well if we are seen to fail and they aren’t) in incident resolution. If this continues there is likely to be a further problem, the active European Systems Admins will be pestered to death with requests for information. So it is likely that the title of this post should read “I think I should be measured for a coffin”. The powers that be will be blind to the petty politics being played out here, however a picture like the one above is sure to wake them up – especially in these times of corporate liability etc. Our European colleagues seem to have the same lack of interest in the care of the company and it’s customers that our British colleagues do, this is just such a disappointment.
I would like to find a party to blame for all of the short fall in our performance, but the truth is that no one of the systems admins could be blamed for our short comings. If the fault lies any where it is with the management, the opportunities that have been squandered are too many to list. The people who run the systems have done as they have asked, it just seems to be that they haven’t been asked to do the things that really matter. When we have had major problems, we have all pulled together and when additional resource has been required people have managed to do all that has been asked of them and sometimes more. But in truth where we have had a local problem it has been solved by local resource, mainly because the national management have the backbone of an invertebrate and won’t actually tell people what to do. When these situations arise, it’s more likely that everyone will sink to the lowest level and that a sequence of pictures like the ones in this post will portray the feelings of the people involved over the duration of the working arrangements.