Adventures in Management I

Have you ever felt like you were mopping the floor while the house burned down around you?

What I mean by that is this, have you ever been tasked with something completely asinine. Then, when an actual system down situation occurs that results in an up time percentage reduction you are harangued about why you abandoned your "important task" to waste time fixing this problem that is burning your feet.

Managers, listen to me, I beg of you. DO NOT lose sight of the important things because you have these little projects that are important to someone higher up. If you have a network outage or a server down and your clients cannot connect to the network that is a much larger problem than lining all the spare drives up evenly in the storage cabinet.

I know that you probably get a lot of pressure to complete these tasks. I am sure that they are important, but in the grand "big picture" scheme of things the most important thing is the users. Without the users there is no need at all for us. We must always remember that we exist but to support our clients and if that isn't the primary thought in our minds then we should beware because in this economic climate it is embarrassingly easy to find people that have that necessary customer commitment.

I will add more of these little gaffs as I think of them.

Until then adieu
Brian