Are you sure? Doesn’t sound like any “management” I’ve actually seen in corporate America.
Most of the “management” I’ve been involved with consists of layers of bureaucrat who seem to serve no other purpose besides sucking up to some more senior bureaucrat. I litterally have seven “bosses” across three different departments, dotted lined to each other. The one team’s purpose, as far as I can tell, is nothing more than producing project charters and status reports for several layers of C-level management.
This is a pretty large company, but it was the same in my last company. Out of a dozen employees in my office, we had two vice presidents, two account managers, an engagement manager, a “client relationship manager”, and like 2 analysts doing the actual work.
The point being, for every manager who actually leads a team of people to complete some task or run some department, there seem to be a ton more who serve no other purpose besides shufling paper and emails and Powerpoint decks up and down the line.
IT people always act as if their jobs are unquantifyable because they spend their entire day putting out random fires. But just because you are running around busy all day doesn’t mean you are being as effective as you can be or need to be in your job. The fact is, there are specific business questions your manager (or you) will need to be able to answer. Are you investing enough in infrastructure? Do you have enough staff? Are you providing appropriate levels of support? Do you even have an effective support plan or is it all reactionary?
A well managed IT organization relies on good process, not the heroic efforts of a couple of key individuals.
I agree with this. As much as I dislike the babysitting it is intended to fix something that’s broken. It hasn’t occurred to me until just now that this may be in advance of adding a person, not firing someone. And yes, I do get a little carried away with my sense of self-importance as an IT guy.
…it never ceases to amaze me when people ask for advice, get advice they don’t agree with and throw out insults in response. You really need to get over yourself.
My point is that I do a lot of stuff, and having to capture it all, quantify it, organize and present it is sort of a pain in the ass. Especially since I’ve been at the job over 5 years and never had to do it before. Add to that, the reports are only a part of it, but they are the part that annoy me most because they are the most time-consuming. There’s also an element of actual, hands-on “do it this way” and constant questioning of the most mundane trivialities on day-to-day operations. Again, I understand it needs to be done, and if they’d rather pay me to write reports than actually work 10 hours a week, then so be it. This isn’t the worst thing to happen to me in 14 years of IT, but it does make the work a little less pleasant.
And I thought the thread might spark some interesting discussion
…it wasn’t snarky at all: they were just saying that what they didn’t perceive what you claimed was micromanagement to be micromanagement. I made my early career in the hospitality trade and if you think that handling five tasks in an hour is “multi-tasking” there is no way you could handle six hours behind a hot stove flipping burgers.
If you really are spending an hour a day on this: then that will become obvious when you report to your boss, shouldn’t it?
Yeah, and that’s a problem. Even if these managers are actually serving an important purpose, the fact that this purpose is unknown to everyone else in the organization means people will have a hard time taking them seriously when they ask for things. Which is why many are so often called micromanagers, even when techinically they aren’t.
