02 Apr 2011
Know What You’re Signing Up For
At its core, the MIKE2.0 Methodology is fundamentally about people. So is any development or deployment methodology, really. Systems don’t implement themselves and, despite what Watson recently accomplished on Jeopardy!, that’s not about to happen anytime soon.
Yes, it’s still all about people and people-related issues. I’m talking about things like:
- communication
- project, change, and performance management
- managing group and individual workloads
- putting the right people in the right roles
- managing expectations
- staffing appropriately
Much of this sticky stuff hinges upon the organization. In this post, however, I want to remind people about the choices they have when choosing employment.
Matching People and Organizations
About seven years ago, I was happily employed as a full-time consultant for a large company. The company liked me and vice-versa. Other than the near-constant travel, I really couldn’t complain.
One day, I received a call from a big company based in my home state of New Jersey about a full-time job. Because the job would enable me to sleep in my own bed at night, I took the interview.
The company was trying to take its IT department to the next level and, at the risk of being immodest, I had the precise skills for which the company was looking. I had asked about the company’s current use of technology. As I suspected, it was a mess.
But here’s the rub: key people within the company wanted to do things better. What’s more, my would-be manager and her boss (a VP) knew that I could help do jus tthat. I was flattered but still a bit skeptical.
- Would the company be willing to let go of long-held processes and antiquated reports?
- Would key people, the culture, and the organization let me make things better?
That VP called me personally to tell me that I was the company’s top choice and that I would be able to “take things to the next level.”
How wrong I was.
Over the next three months, I was in a constant state of push-and-pull not only with my manager, but with influential end-users who just wanted things to be done the way they always had. It didn’t matter I knew better ways of extracting and inputting information into the company’s systems. I was proposing something different, and that was a problem. For example, key reports that took days to manually cobble together could have been rewritten and published via the web for scheduled delivery.
“We don’t do it that way here”, I was constantly told.
After three months, my manager and an HR person sat me down in an office and told me that that day was going to be my last. Angered, I had asked why they just didn’t tell me when I interviewed there that they were stuck in their ways. We could have all saved us the hassle of a failed hire.
Simon Says
I used to blame my manager and VP for lying to me during the interview process. I don’t anymore. I should have realized that I was signing up for madness and a fundamental aversion to change, no matter what they said.
Big, bureaucratic organizations are often stuck in a perpetual state of dysfunction and, if key people admit it, they’ll never staff positions with skilled folks.
Learn from my mistake. If you like constantly improvement and fixing problems, don’t take an information management role in a clunky organization, no matter what you are told and by whom. Powerful technologies and reporting tools mean nothing if the organization is hell-bent on utilizing the same old manual (read: broken) processes.
Feedback
What say you?
April 7th, 2011 at 10:59 pm
I take finding this post as a sign (not that I believe in those things). I am currently in a similar situation. I have a great consulting job with a great client and have an opportunity to take a “regular” job close to home doing the kind of work I like at a big corporation. Those opportunities do not come often in the area where I live. During the interview process I was told repeatedly (by the VP and others) that they are ready for change and to move to the next level. When I left I had a nagging feeling all is not right. I haven’t been offered the job yet, and there is still that pesky issue of compensation to deal with, but I will keep your story in the back of my mind if it comes down to choosing what to do.
June 16th, 2011 at 1:25 am
Don’t make the mistake that these kind of issues are only with big business – i found myself in EXACTLY the same position with a company of only 20 people. I took the role as IT Manager with a small company just over 18 months ago. They too wanted to move to the next level, both technically and commercially. I thought it was a step up in my career, it brought me back to Scotland, and everything seemed great. Not even one month in, I realised that what had been said, and what was actually required were two different things completely. No matter what I tried, it was always viewed as ‘not the way we do things’. Couple this with the constant question of why can’t you deliver now? I spent 18 months trying to move the company in the right direction, contant criticism from the Owner/Directors, and recruiting a very capable team who could have delivered what they wanted in their sleep. I was labelled as a maverick, that I brought unrest into the company, and one by one the team I recruited left. I was left with the longest member of the IT Team who’s only consideration was how good could he look in front of the owners. Outcome? I moved on to a large Systems Integration company last month, the remainder of my team were fired after I left, and the small company have outsourced to a large SI provider. Moral of the story – if you have any doubts during the interview process, listen to them – they’re often right!!