We had a bit of a sketch at work, recently. The developers had made some code changes to add new functionality that our users desperately wanted. The change went in the night before a public holiday, which in retrospect wasn’t a great idea (especially as the programmer who made the change had flown back to Poland for the long weekend). On the off chance that there might be problems, I went into work the next day anyway.
When I got in (at 7:00 am), I found out that the implementation hadn’t gone in cleanly, and now none of our retail sites (worldwide) could enter orders into the system. This was a bit of a problem, given our kanban philosophy of maintaining minimal stock on site and ordering replenishment just in time (and just about every day). Within minutes the problem was escalated all the way to Vice President level, and the few of us in the office were left scrabbling around trying to find the dialing code for Poland, and working out why on-call system support in America weren’t answering the ‘phone. It took most of the day to find out the cause of the problem (the software that is supposed to propagate the changed code out to the servers basically didn’t, even though it said it did…), and it took people in Spain, Poland, Houston, England, and here in Brussels, to fix it.
Typically, the next (working) day the blamestorming started. Now, I’m in the Change Management team (actually, I’m pretty much the whole team), and we’d done everything by the book - going through the full change control process, advising the users a week before that the change was going in, and publishing documentation on the new functionality well in advance. My only mistake was going into work on a public holiday, and then taking the initiative to handle communications with the users, keeping them and their management informed of the status throughout the issue, and advising them of the subsequent resolution. In all of my communications I was careful to put as much of a positive spin on the situation as I could (or at least to down-play the impact), and took great care not to pin the blame on any one group or individual (especially our people here in Brussels), positioning the issue as unforeseeable and unavoidable.
Despite this, I found myself being hauled over the coals for several hours by senior management, as each manager tried to prove it wasn’t their group’s fault. The Support Manager (whose group had installed the change – and whose group, if anyone, should take responsibility) was positively apoplectic. “What the f*** happened? Weren’t you supposed to manage this change?” (As though I was supposed to have predicted that the tried-and-tested system would fail this time!) “So now my team is left looking like a bunch of f***ing monkeys!” I explained what had happened (for about the fourth time that day), and tried to lighten the mood a bit by saying “Yeah, it’s a bit unfortunate as I know the users are going to love this new functionality”. Bad move. “Well thank you very f***ing much for that! But it doesn’t f***ing work does it?”. Before I had the chance to point out that yes, it did actually work now, he’d stomped back to his office, slamming the door behind him so hard the walls shook. He was immediately on the ‘phone to his manager, and through the walls I could clearly hear the phrase “stupid bastards” and the f-word liberally peppering his conversation.
Now, I may not be a manager (God forbid that ever happens – remember the Peter Principle), but I do know a bit about leadership. And I’m pretty sure that swearing at the staff and belittling them in an open-plan office (especially when they were only trying to cover your ass in the first place) won’t exactly make them respect you. Or make them want to do anything for you ever again.
We’ve got another public holiday coming up soon, but this time I’m going to be at home, sat on the sofa, with my ‘phone switched off. Let’s see the ungrateful bastard manage that change…
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