Saturday, December 06, 2008

Boy does this hit home

I was reading the TechRepublic article Five things your manager could be doing better and a couple hit home:

1. Dealing with personnel problems sooner rather than later. Yep, we have a problem person who is always late, toxic, and intimidating when peer reviewing your work, and hostile to reviews of his work. She brought him in from another department over the concerns of a couple of people, myself included . He is a long time employee and (as a Subject Matter Expert) would review projects late in the process, instead of early on as he was suppose to, causing all sorts of grief to our department. She insisted having him in the department would be less troublesome than having him in someone else's department and causing us problems with no accountability. Its not working out so far, as his sloppy approach to code design cost me 20 hours last week alone, and the department over a 100.
4. Be an advocate for the team. Oh boy, does this apply. Since the first day she walked in here, she has expanded the role of our department. We have taken over various support duties from other departments (we are suppose to be a development department) and now are taking on some QA roles as well. The last one is particularly galling as we have a well staffed QA group who do excellent work. But starting in January, we are going to take on 'Validation' testing of projects before they are submitted to QA. We are suppose to do this with no increase in personnel and with everyone fully scheduled with projects to the point any defects that come in, cause someone to be pulled from a project.