For the last several years, I’ve been managing the Blackboard course management system for a college; it’s where professors can put up course material, teach, and generally enhance teaching. I’ve been doing whatever I could to make it easy to use, to try to increase faculty use, to answer every question, to find ways to make the system more flexible, and to wrestle with a pretty complicated program, made more complicated by decisions beyond my control.
Yesterday, I was told I would no longer be handling Blackboard.
It had nothing to do with my work; it was pure College politics. The School of Science made a lot of noise and everyone caved. They will be taking things over as soon as possible.
Ironically, the main precipitating issue was a complaint by a teacher there. She was having a problem uploading a file. I checked and found no problem with the system, so I suggested that she contact the person in charge of the SOS (yes, that’s their abbreviation) network. (As background, last year the SOS insisted they could run their own network and they didn’t want I&TS to be involved with their computers – they got their wish.) So the problem was either due to something in their network restricting access, or due to some issue with the individual user’s machine, neither of which I was allowed to deal with.
Now, the people who screwed up are the ones who will be running the system.
This is wrong on all sorts of levels, but the worst is the fact that I was never consulted on this until it was a done deal. My boss has always been a good guy about things, but he made the decision and kept me completely in the dark about it until yesterday morning. Yes, I would have objected, but at least I would have felt my input and hard work was respected.
The only good thing is that I’m not losing my job over this, and I will be reassigned (but it would have been nice to know this in advance; I haven’t slept in two nights worrying). (As I’m writing this, he just came in and said he does have some projects for me.)
Perhaps I have too much ownership of the project, but I still think this is a bad decision on all levels and hate to see my hard work turned over to people who won’t be able to handle it (it was at least 75% of my time, and the person who will take over my responsibilities already has full-time responsibilities – I’m not even sure if he has the skill set necessary to do what needs to be done).