Alex had just started as an intern for a small financial investment firm in Lacey, Washington. His boss, the company founder, Penelope took him to lunch shortly after he started.
So tell me Andrew, what do you like to do in your spare time?
I’m a runner. I never ran in high school, but during college, I found I really enjoy it.
Are you any good?
Well. . .yeah, actually. My times were good enough to qualify me for Nationals this summer.
Are you going to go?
Nah. I mean, it’s time to move on, right? I’ve got a job now. I don’t have time for that.
What would you do, if you were Penelope? He’s a smart kid. He’s also an intern in your small 4 person company. Penelope’s decision helped set the course of Alex’s life.
I’m not sharing any earth-shattering news when I tell you that your employees have lives. They have families, hobbies, passions, dogs. In fact, as much as we would often like to think the opposite, your employees show up to work so that they can fund their rest of their lifestyle.
The workforce is less like Steve Jobs who took $1/year in salary while at Apple, and more like . . .well, everyone else; who, as much as they might love their job, would quit tomorrow if they won the lottery. As “the boss” you have a responsibility to your employees. You need to be the one to give them the flexibility to live their lives.
Now, we all have to focus on getting the work done, but at the end of the day, you can control whether your employees feel their work is something that helps them enjoy the rest of your life or not. And it’s not hard. And it doesn’t take a lot of money.
It’s easy when an employee has an actual crisis, to play the good boss. Your employee’s grandmother passed away, so you give them unscheduled time off to attend the funeral. Your employee has a child in the hospital, you encourage them to “take as much time as you need” to be there for their sick child.
But, what about the ordinary, everyday, events that come up? Those aren’t your responsibility, right? You don’t need to make any accomodations. That’s what you have a personal time off policy for. That’s what you pay people for.
Sure, all of that is true. And if you publish your policy , and you obey the Family and Medical Leave Act guidelines, your employees will work when they should and take their personal time off to pursue their own interests on their own time. If that’s all you do, your employees will not even consider whether you are a good boss or a bad boss in that respect. Why would they? You’re just doing what you said you would do when they were hired.
But, consider the alternative. Suppose your employee comes to you says,
I know that there’s not a training budget for programming classes, but I really think being able to program would help me in my career. If I pay the class fee, could I work a couple Saturdays and get comp time to attend a class next week?
The guy is a help desk agent. Why does he need to learn programming? Should you give him the time off? Should you make him take personal days? Is a comp time switch the best solution? What if you just gave him the training days?
There is no “right” answer in every case. However, the more you say “yes” in these situations, the more you build loyalty. And you also get better educated, better skilled employees. And when you interviewed him, didn’t you say you were looking for a “self-starter”? Well, here he is. Do everything you can to encourage him.
Penelope decided that she needed to do everything she could to give Alex the opportunity to participate in what was literally a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Alex, if you want to compete at Nationals, I think that is really important. We can arrange your work responsibilities so that you have that chance.
But, that’s going to inconvenience a lot of your other staff.
Don’t worry about that. This is important to you and we can make it work.
Alex, the intern went to the National Championships. He placed third in his event. His time was just half a second off the Olympic qualifying time. Neither Alex nor Penelope ever forgot it. Alex, the intern stayed with the small investment firm, eventually becoming a partner and when Penelope retired, he became the managing partner.
Did the fact that Penelope arranged for him to be able to attend the National Championship make him a managing partner? No. He did that by being very good at his job. But, the trip to Nationals made it obvious to Alex, that this firm cared about its employees, that they cared about him, even though he was just an intern. It helped instill a sense of loyalty that stayed with him his entire career.
Your employees have lives. Take an interest. Encourage when you can. The rewards will be measured in more than money.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Hello?
Hi Dad.
What’s up?
You’re going to your caucus, right?
Yeah.
I’ve never been and I was wondering if you could tell me what to expect?
Last night I gathered with 191 of my friends and neighbor’s and we picked a . . .well, it’s not totally clear what we picked, but we picked a bunch of stuff. . .and we sort of held not exactly a caucus but not exactly a primary for president.
Caucus are either the way that individuals are empowered in the political process, or they are a way for the establishment to control state politics. It really depends on whom you ask.
The premise of a caucus is pretty simple. And ours opened well. I was running the sounds system. I as the A half of A/V. The V side was the Chairperson’s husband. He put together a slideshow to get us through some of the more tedious parts of the evening. We have to read the Utah party platform. . .every word. But, we found a YouTube video of it.
First problem of the night was during setup. We realized that the only way to see the projector in the elementary school cafeteria we were in was to turn off the lights. . .ALL of them. We could plunge the entire room, including the registration table into darkness or we could skip the video portion. I had the sound working great. At least the stuff from his laptop.
As people filed in and got registered, I decided I’d play some music.
What would you pick for a political meeting? Country music? Patriotic stuff? I finally opted for jazz. It was background noise anyway. I put on Caleb Chapman’s Crescent Super Band. He lives in our little town and his band is really good.
We started right at 7:00pm. And I found my first issue. The microphones were only coming out of one speaker. As we listened to someone pray and then lead us in the pledge of allegiance. I kept fiddling with my setup. The sound from the YouTube video played great. Just as we expected, no one listened anyway.
Finally fixed the mics by ripping out all other connections, the music was done anyway, and just running the mics. First order of business was to figure out how to vote. There are basically three ways you can vote at a caucus.
1. Plurality: Everyone votes for their favorite candidate. The one with the most votes wins. This is the quickest, but not considered best since the “winner” won’t have gotten 50% of the vote.
2. Popular majority vote: You vote in rounds. After the first round, if no one has 50%, you drop the lowest performing candidate and vote again. Continue until someone gets 50% or more. The problem is people have to get up and vote multiple times. We had almost 200 people. That would be a long process..
3. Preference majority: Similar to the popular majority option, but you list all your candidates in the order you like them. The judges have a REALLY complicated process to narrow it down to the required number of winners. This is what we picked.
Next we moved right into voting for officers. The real goal of caucus night is to get home before 10:00pm. Fortunately there were only two candidates for Chair. One vote later and our chairperson had just won reflections. (Incumbents are so hard to beat.) Next was Vice Chair. The guy who lost as Chair was quickly nominated. There were no other nominations. Congratulations, you’re the new Vice Chair and we didn’t have to vote. It’s only 8:15 and we are half way through.
Next up was Secretery/Treasure. The position only really has to do anything during the caucus. One candidate and no others later, we have our next officer.
And that’s where it got slow. . .really slow.
We needed to elect three state delegates. A state delegate is someone who will go and choose who the party’s nominee for certain races is going to be. So, we were voting for someone who was going to go and vote for someon who we were then going to vote for in November. The delegates are expected to go and meet all the candidates.
Some candidates hate Utah’s caucus system. A few years ago we had a senator from Utah named Bob Bennett. He wanted to keep being the senator from Utah. Unfortunately for him, the caucus system kicked him out. Mike Lee ended up getting his seat.
Like I said, some love it, some hate it.
The seven candidates for state delegate come up and each gave a brief one minute speech.
I got to play sound guy.
Please don’t stand directly in front of the speakers when you are talking into the microphone.
So, they all came and stood behind my rope line and walked all over my wires. IN FRONT, IN FRONT of the rope!
The most interesting part of the evening was the questions. Someone asked “Who will you vote for president tonight.” Apparently you aren’t supposed to ask potential delegates who they would vote for. Something about an illegal question. Fortunately the candidates didn’t know it was an illegal question. We got votes for Cruz, Kasich, Trump and Jesus Christ. (I didn’t know he was running.)
The judges took 45 minutes to figure out which 3 people were going to be our delegates. It was now about 8:50. The Chairperson opened the floor for county delegates.
Now, remember that if we get the exact number of nomination as the number of positions, we don’t have to vote again.
The final nominations were done a few minutes before nine pm. We had exactly five nominees for our five delegate spots. The last bit of business was the Presidential Preferance Poll. In a typical caucus, you try to recruit delegates to your candidates. We didn’t do that. We simply picked a name off the list.
We had 191 caucus goers. Ted Cruz earned 145 of those votes. It was never a question of IF Cruz would win Utah, but simply HOW MUCH? If Cruz wins more than 50% he gets all 40 of the votes.
The process was kind of messy. The vote counting, which I’d been trained on, but didn’t have to do last night, is the most complicated system I’ve ever seen.
But, I think democracy, or more accurately a democratic republic, should be a little messy.
Like Jimmy Dugan, in A League Of Their Own said,
It’s supposed to be hard. It’s the hard that makes it great. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.
Did you vote this year? Mention it in the comments. This will be my last political post until probably the election in November.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Tonight I get to take part in an event that that has its roots over 200 years ago.
After the meeting of the Consitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked,
Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?
A republic, if you can keep it.
Thus started one of the great experiments in the history of the world. Previously governments were the source of people’s rights. The US Constitution was founded on the idea that people have inalienable rights. Rather than tell citizens what they could do, the Constitution was created to tell the government what it couldn’t do.
Many of the details of our government have changed in the ensuing 229 years. But, the core remains the same.
Here in Utah we have our caucus today. It’s an odd, almost anachronistic system. Tonight we will gather in small neighborhood groups and select the people who will select the people whom we will vote on to represent us. I was a state delegate last year.
My neighbors will vie to be voted in as Chairperson of our caucus. Vice Chair, secretary and/or Treasurer, State Delegates and County Delegates. We’ll argue over how to vote. (Majority or plurality.) We’ll argue some more over how to vote. (Preference or popular vote.) After all the shouting is over, we’ll also have a presidential preference poll. It’s not a primary and it’s not exactly a traditional caucus.
Basically, everyone will vote for a candidate and then we’ll tally the votes and report them to the state officers to report to the election committees. In a traditional caucus, you try to get people to join “your” candidate. Their will be none of that tonight.
In one sense, my vote means nothing. There will be hundreds of thousands of people casting votes tonight. If I vote one way or another, it won’t really make any difference. And yet, our elections are like a raging river that is made up millions of individual drops. My vote, won’t make a difference, but our votes will be really important.
While I’m running for a delegate position again the year, during the caucus, I created my own job. I convinced the Chairperson that I’d run the sound system. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to, and I can control people’s microphones.
I will be caucusing for one party. I have very close friends who will be caucusing for the other party. The beauty of our grand experiment is that I can be passionate about my candidate and my friends can be equally passionate for a candidate on the other side. But, we can remain friends and even encourage one another to be involved.
So, whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican or another party, if you live in Utah, or Arizona, or American Somoa, or Idaho (Democrats only) get out and vote. You’re a drop in the river, but the river gets its power from all of those little drops.
As for me, look for me behind the sound board.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Waddaya mean it’s Monday? What happened to Sunday?
I was so busy that I got nothing done.
It was supposed to be a nice relaxing weekend. Sure, I had some stuff planned, but not too much. It wasn’t my fault; the way it went, I mean. I really did plan better than that.
The weekend started on Friday night. I had a church basketball game at 9:00pm. Basketball is very important in the Mormon church. Our beautiful meeting houses have a chapel that will seat a couple hundred backed by a full sized basketball court. . .with electronic scoreboards and timers.
It’s kind of a big deal. It’s also the only fight I’ve ever been to that starts with a prayer. I enjoy playing, and don’t care as much about winning. Some of my teammates seemed to have the opposite opinion. The longer the game went, the further we got behind and the more agressive my teammates got. We survived with no blows thrown, but I was relieved that we’d lost. It meant one more thing off my schedule. See, there was another game at 9:00am Saturday if we won.
Saturday morning was the only slow part of my weekend. At 10:30 on Saturday I was supposed to take our scouts around the neighborhood and pick up food that families had donated. That was fine. But, at 10:00am my phone rang. There was a problem with the call center. So, I was on the phone with them while trying to get the boys pointed in the right direction in the neighborhood. Have you heard a van full of 13 year old boys on a Saturday?
Hey guys, sorry, but can you keep it down. I’m on a call for work.
Yeah, I was that guy.
It took about an hour to collect the donations, take them to the drop-off location and take the boys for ice cream. I spent the entire time with an earbud stuck in my ear. After we dropped off the last of the boys, I went to my office and continued to work the outage. During much of the time I was on two phone bridges; our internal one and the client one.
I was still on those bridges at 3:00pm when I was supposed to go to the Orem Public Libary, Storytelling wing and judge the preliminary round of the Utah’s Biggest Liar competition.
Ah, guys? Yeah, I’m going to put you on mute. I have this thing I’m supposed to judge. I’ll still be on the bridge, just yell if you need me, but it might take a while for me to answer.
There I sat at the judges table, watching the performers, many of whom had practiced their stories for months. And I had that phone bud hangin out of my ear. In between performances, I quickly marked my grade sheet and then stepped away to talk on my bridge for a couple of minutes.
Again, I was that guy.
The competition ended shortly after 5:00. Fortunately, we only needed to pick the six best that would move on to the finals. Judging the finals is brutal The phone calls only slightly before the competition did. A quick dinner and it was time to go to the pre-caucus meeting. Utah’s political caucuses are tomorrow night. I’m on the committee to help run the caucus. We had a meeting Saturday night to plan the Tuesday meeting. My phone rang twice. I ignored it. (I was tired of being that guy. And it wasn’t work calling anyway.) The caucus planning meeting went until around 9:00pm. We were sitting around talking when the meeting reminder on my phone went off. I had a previously scheduled maintenance test for work at 9:30.
Oh, sorry. I have to go. I’m late for a meeting.
Yup. I was that guy again.
The testing started at 9:30pm and went until 4:00am. Most of the time I just had to be on the call. Occasionally I had to get other people to join. But, I couldn’t leave. . .until 4:00am. I crawled into bed around 4:30. My 9:00am church time came and went without me. I puttered around a little during the day when my wife reminded me that the kids had a meeting Sunday night to plan a summer camp. . .and a parent had to attend the meeting with them.
We were home again by 8:30. I looked at my todo list for the weekend. He meetings were done, of course, but the projects that I was going to do in between were still sitting there, undone.
I really don’t know what happened. It seems like it was just yesterday that it was Friday and I was looking forward to the weekend. I was sure busy. I just wish I’d been less busy and gotten more done.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Sorry to tell you this. Your bracket has more losses than mine. I wasn’t even worried. Yale, a #12 seed wins their first NCAA tournament game? No problem. Providence #9 knocks out USC #8? Not worried. Tiny Little Rock, a #12 upsets #5 Purdue? Not concerned about my bracket at all. BYU loses in the first round again. . .
What’s that? BYU didn’t make the NCAA tournament?
No worries. It has no effect on my bracket.
You see, this year, my bracket is empty. I can state emphatically that I didn’t pick a single game wrong. Not one. We don’t have to talk about the fact that I failed to pick a single winner as well.
I love March Madness. My brother used to put together a family tournament every year. Unfortunately, he owns a CPA firm. That’s great to get him to do my taxes, but March is kind of a busy time for accounting firms. I typically fill out a bracket anyway. This year, my boss sent around a link for our team to join. I meant to. I really did.
Things have been a little busy.
On the positive side, I don’t have to care about games between schools that I’ve never heard of, playing in a location I’m unaware of. And I don’t have to struggle with the moral conundrum of my alma mater BYU in the tournament. See, as a BYU alum, and a fan, I’m always torn when BYU is in the tournament. Do I need to pick them? If I pick against them, am I being disloyal?
Typically I would pick BYU to win their first game and then lose. The problem was that BYU was normally a low seed.
The NCAA tournament includes 64 teams. (Yeah, I know it’s really 68, but the math works better with 64 so go with me on this one.) The tournament is really four separate 16 team tournaments. In a single elimination tournament, the best team plays the worst team. The second best team plays the second worst and so on.
In a 16 team tournament that means that the #1 seed plays the #16. Number 2 plays #15 and so on down to the #8 playing the #9 team. The winners from the first set of games, called the first round, move on to the second round. And the winner of the #1/#16 game plays the winner of the #8/#9 game. Basically, the best team gets to play the worst team in each round.
Here’s my problem with BYU. If BYU is a #15 seed, they play the #2 seed in Round 1. If I pick them to win their first game, I’ve now knocked the #2 seed out of my bracket. As a loyal fan, it was torture every year that BYU made the tournament. Maybe you think I should have simply picked them to lose. That would help my bracket but hurt my bragging rights. I have family members who are University of Utah fans. If I’m in a tournament with them, they get to see my picks. Which would you pick? Potential tournament glory, or a year’s worth of ridicule at the hands of my Ute fan relatives?
It was almost worse than watching the actual game when BYU would lose in the first round.
So, I didn’t skip March Madness on purpose, but it wasn’t all bad.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I remember when my daughter first told me that she and her husband were going to be parents. It was Father’s Day, 2013. She gave me a card that said, “Happy Father’s Day. . .Grandpa.” I still have the card and it still makes me smile. I told her, that having a baby changes your life like no other event can. It’s great, no mistake. But, it’s also like getting a second shadow. You literally have to think about the baby 24 hours per day. You have to always know where she is. You have to constantly be aware of her needs. When she develops motor skills but lack of judgement you have to literally strip from your house everything that is not nailed down that is within three feet of the floor. Your life changes.
I haven’t felt like that in a long, long time. For the past week at work, I’ve felt like a new parent again. A systems issue caused some of our agents to not be able to take calls. It’s my job, in those cases to be on a phone conference, coordinating between IT people and call center agents to get the problem fixed. A long call takes 4-5 hours.This was not just a long call. Since last Wednesday, I’ve spent 50 hours on phone conferences for one issue.
When I designed the process we follow for an outage, I didn’t even consider a multi-day outage. With a problem that lasts for several hours, I simply rearrange my schedule and put off meetings and projects until the outage is over. I can do that for about 2 days. After the third day, the rest of my job, like a toddler in a house with a new baby, insists on some attention as well. For the past four days, I’ve worked at being in two places at one time.
Every morning has followed a similar routine, I call into the phone conference to track my outage and then I start going about my day. I answer email. I talk to coworkers. I go to meetings. I even attended a brief court appearance.
Guys, I’m going to step away from the bridge for just a minute. I’ll be back in about 15 minutes.
I put the phone on mute and turned off the ringer as I walked into the court room. Fifteen minutes later, I’m back on the bridge.
I’m back. How many agents do we still have impacted at this point?
My home office is set up with multiple phones. I have my cell phone, of course. I also have a desk phone that uses the Internet to tie into our corporate phone system. If needed, I also have computer based phone systems that let me dial into online meetings.
My typical look, when I’m on an outage call is I have my desk phone headset on my left ear, and my cell phone headset on my right. I work the mute button to hold two calls at once. From an IT perspective, I can literally be in two places at once. There are people who’ve written articles about how liberating it is to ditch their cell phone. I just laugh at those stories.
My outage call became like a baby that I had to consider every minute of the day. Like a new mom who is going shopping, I took it along. Need to take a shower? Put the baby in her bassinet close by and hurriedly jump in and out. Need to go to the bathroom? MUTE BUTTON! Check it again. I just took my call everywhere.
Yesterday, my multi-day phone outage was finally winding down. We had finally identified the underlying cause. We’d fixed it and I was listening to my call center floors slowly getting everyone back on the phones. I was also in other meetings on my cell phone. And then I lost track of my baby.
My desk phone died. The screen went dark and it literally said, “I cannot connect you right now.” My computer, while it didn’t go dark, disconnected from the network. The online meeting I was in suddenly disappeared. My email announced it was no longer connected.
The meeting I was dialed into on my cell phone was really important. Over half the participants were VPs. They were looking to me for explanations of our new call center location. I couldn’t drop out to go look for my baby. The baby called me. A second call came through on my cell phone. The number said it was our help desk. I knew why they were calling.Do I answer it? Can I sneak away to check briefly on the baby?
So, Rodney. Could you explain again what the technical requirements from the client will be on this new site?
Sure. Happy to. After all, the baby will be fine for a few minutes on its own, right? It was practically done, anyway. I’m sure it’s not out playing in traffic or anything.
I discovered later that a relay on an antenna on the side of a mountain failed and my internet service died. The technicians were in the process of fixing it. Sorry for the brief interruption.
After the call with the VPs ended, I immediately called back into the outage call I’d been on for days.
This is Rodney, rejoining the bridge.
Rodney, where did you go? We’re still seeing a few agents that are getting the error.
Yup, my child still needed me for at least a little while longer. But, my superpower of being able to be in two places at one time was severely limited.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I was in the second grade.
Teacher, what’s the biggest number in the world?
There is no biggest, Rodney. The numbers go on forever.
It didn’t make sense to my seven year old brain. I spent longer than I’m proud to admit trying to think of really big numbers. . .and then adding one and realizing I needed to start again.
I’ve always been fascinated by limits. I think it’s in our very nature. We want to know how high we can fly. How fast we can run. How far we can stretch our cell phone battery. My town of Pleasant Grove is situated between the mountains to the East and the lake to the West. For this reason several streets have a beginning and an end. I’ve been from one end to another, as far as you can go on several of these streets and roads.
I had a really long phone call at work yesterday. I’m still working with our partner to find a solution to an issue affecting several of our agents. The problem has been occurring for several days. Today it started at 7:30 and I knew I was in for a marathon day. I spend most of the day during these outage calls, on my desk phone. I dial into a phone conference with people from all my call centers and we work the issue together. Much of the time is spent waiting for updates. I use my cell phone to make calls to the client, and to dial into other meetings that I have to attend at the same time as my outage call is going on. My cell phone lasts most of the day, but on a particularly busy day it starts to get tired in the afternoon. It reaches it’s limit and needs some time to recharge.
The next piece of equipment to reach a limit is typically my Bluetooth headset. The headset is the only thing that makes an hours long phone call bearable. It’s fortunately pretty comfortable. But, yesterday I figured out it has a limit. I’d never noticed before since it takes at least eight hours of continuous use for it to die.
At first I couldn’t figure out where the beeping was coming from. It sounded not unlike a bomb countdown. (Okay, maybe my mind was playing tricks with that last image.) Fortunately the phone has a speakerphone option. The headset needed to take a break.
The final piece of equipment that ran into its limit was a surprise. The counter on my phone has a limit. Probably for no other reason than it can, the phone keeps track of how long the current call has lasted. Yesterday, I found out that unlike a second grader, my phone does know the biggest number: nine hours, fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds.
Sadly, unlike a road, when I got to the end of my phone battery, my headset battery and my phone timer, I didn’t get to stop. I stay on our calls until the problem has been resolved at each of my three call centers. Yesterday, that meant I was “on the bridge” as the saying goes, up until 9:00pm, when we stop taking calls for the day. One more limit reached. The call lasted a total of twelve and a half hours.
Oh, I’ve gotta go. My phone is ringing.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Jack, didn’t you used to work in our Baton Rouge office?
Yeah, I was the desktop lead who opened the center. Why?
I need some help putting a plan together to revamp it for another client. Can I pick your brain a little?
Jack was no longer a desktop engineer. In fact, Jack didn’t have anything to do with Baton Rouge, or my project. Jack had a very demanding new role working with a very high profile, high maintenance client. Why would Jack help me? Should I even ask him? Was it reasonable to ask him to take time to answer my questions about a center he hadn’t worked at in years?
It’s true, what they say, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
Andrew Jackson was president in 1829. He had a problem. His cabinet, the Secreteries that were supposed to help him run the government, were ineffective. Internal strife was so bad that Jackson quit holding cabinet meetings. Instead, he turned to a group of trusted friends. These men became known in the press as the “kitchen cabinet.” They effectively took the place of the official cabinet until 1831 when Jackson was able to reorganize his official cabinet.
Every project has an official project team. There should be a project manager, a sponsor, and at least a few people known as “resources” to get the work done. Every effective project manager I know also has an unofficial project team. Friends, aquaintences, or even just coworkers who owe you a favor, or enjoy working with you. Every project runs into obstacles. Nothing goes exactly according to plan. There are times when the difference between success and failure can be the ability to call in a favor, or contact someone outside normal channels. I’ve seen projects, often led by new project managers that hit their first roadblock and come to a halt. The frustrated PM attempts to push his (or her) project forward, over the speed bump, but it refuses to budge. It’s at those times that often a single phone call can make the difference.
I once was had a project with an incredibly short timeline. We had planned well, but another team failed to deliver on time. It put our entire three day rollout in jeopardy. My team of engineers looked to me in frustration.
What should we do? Should we cancel and reschedule? It’s a 90 day delay.
No. Let me see what I can do in the next 24 hours.
I made some calls. I called in a few favors. I went outside the normal lines of communication. It was a tight squeeze, but we managed to get the project back on track and avoid the three month delay.
Rather than hindering projects, these lines of communication outside of the normal hierarchy are signs of a strong organization. Rather than discourage them, you should be encouraging this type of collaboration. It makes for stronger teams and more successful projects.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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I didn’t wear pants on Friday. It was not completely unexpected.
My kids were born all over the world. I have a child who was born in southern China. One that was born in India. Four that were born in Haiti. Two that were born in Utah. Two born in Washington. And three born in Colombia. Of those locations, the only one that could reasonably be described as a winter climate is Utah. And even in Utah, it’s only winter for half the year. The rest of the year is warm. However, all those children have done a great job acclimatizing themselves to Utah’s cold climate. One of my sons wore shorts to our winter camp. He was just fine. They will wear shorts all year long. They’d wear them to church if we permitted it.
I’m not like my boys. I never wear shorts. (And, of course, now I’m going to tell you a story about wearing shorts.) I need to offer one caveat, or one exception. I love to play basketball. I was never a great player, and now as the years have slowed my steps, I’m mostly just taking up space. But, I enjoy it. I play basketball twice a week in the early morning. On Tuesdays and Friday, I get up and make it to the local LDS Church at 6:00am to huff and puff for an hour or so.
Friday was no exception. However, my job sometimes gets in the way. Last week I worked through a lingering issue in my call centers. (When My ADHD Fails Me.) On Thursday, after eight hours on the phone, we finally were to the point where the problem was gone for the day. But, I was sure it would show up once our agents started comin going on Friday morning.
Our call centers open at 5:30am. My early morning basketball starts at 6:00am. My phone rang at 6:59am. My team played four on five while I ran to my phone.
Rodney, this is Incident Management . . .
Yeah, I know. You have an issue with the portal screen going blank at all three centers.
Yeah. . .we uh. . .
Tell you what, give me 15 minutes and I’ll call in and join the bridge.
Okay. . . We’re on bridge 5.
Great. I’ll talk to you in a few minutes.
Our game finished up and I called back in as we were leaving the church. We were still trying to figure out what was causing the issue. I called into my help desk and joined their call and I called my client and checked to find out what next thing they wanted to try to resolve the issue.
I used my two phones and spent the day in my office.
Ten hours later, we were no closer to finding the issue, but enough agents had finished their shifts to make it no longer an issue.
And that is how I ended up not wearing pants to work on Friday.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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It wasn’t until I was an adult that I figured out I had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD.) Actually, I have the Hyperactivity thrown in for good measure. Having ADHD is frustrating and extremely useful. If, as Kipling says, you can keep your head while all around you are losing theirs, you probably have ADHD. We make great crisis managers.
The more chaotic a setting, the easier it is for me to jump in and make a difference. One aspect of my current job is managing our outage calls. When something goes wrong, as it did this week, it’s my job to bring order out of chaos and figure out how to get us back on track as quickly as possible. Often that means an hour or two on multiple phone bridges. This was not a typical week. Over the past two days I’ve spent about 15 hours on multiple phone bridges trying to get a small group of our agents back to a healthy state.
While there are times where the phone bridges are very busy, most of the time is spent waiting. While an ADHD person does great during a crisis, we do terrible during the lulls. It’s boring. And boredom is the bane of any ADHD suffer. We don’t get bored. Or, I should more accurately say, we don’t stay bored. We look for shiny stuff and allow ourselves to be distracted.
Here’s where my ADHD really messes me up. You would think that being on a five hour phone call, as I was yesterday, or an eight hour call like the day before, I’d get lots done during the lulls. After all, I just need to “distract” myself with the other tasks I have on my todo list.
Nope. It doesn’t work that way. I used to feel bad about it. Then, I figured it out. I still feel bad, but I’ve learned to not beat myself up over it.Because while ADHD people are easily distracted, we also have the ability to hyper-focus. It’s a cruel irony that the same person who seems to have the attention span of a gnat, also is capable of intense focus and concentration, and this is the bad part, to the exclusion of everything else.
I’ll find myself during a lull jumping into my email and I’ll start working on a solution to a question and before I know it, I’ll suddenly look up and 15 minutes will have gone by. And I will have no idea what is happening on my outage bridge. Did I make an assignment that I’m waiting on? Is someone waiting on something from me? Did someone say something and I missed it? I actually missed the end of one bridge call. This one was a testing call. The engineers finished their work, the project manager shut down the call and I was still on the phone bridge working through my email. I had to sheepishly ask the PM the next day if I had any assignments from the call.
So, to avoid similar embarrassing moments, I find I can’t let myself get too far removed from the call. Mindless tasks? Sure. Online news stories? Perfect distraction. Answering email? No way. I get lost.
So, even though I spent two days sitting on phone bridges, I’m now pretty much two days behind on my other tasks. Sadly, the issue from yesterday will reoccurs today as we continue to look for the root cause. I have another hours long phone call to look forward to.
ADHD is definitely a blessing and a curse. But, at least my system outage plays to my strengths.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved