Chapter 15 Automatic Inform Systems for IT workers.
“Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.” Paul Hawken
I have been working in the IT field for many years now. It is a grueling field, where you end up working weekends, and odd hours. It requires a lot of concentration and it’s very hard to concentrate when you are being interrupted.
A typical scenario is like this. You have to work a number of tasks at once, because you can only make changes in very tight windows, called maintenance windows. Something goes wrong. You start getting called by various people wondering why the problems are not fixed. The people calling you don’t realize that the very act of calling you is severely hampering the troubleshooting efforts.
It’s hard to explain this to managers for the most part. The best managers understand it and leave you alone. When there is an explanation called for, they run interference for you and let you concentrate on the problem at hand. Unfortunately, the ratio of good to poor managers is very low.
All this leaves a golden opportunity for a nice piece of application software development. What you need is a system with a nice GUI interface that’s called the “Manager Notification System”. As soon as you start working on a really strenuous technical problem, you kick off this system. This is meant for rank and file technical workers, not the type of alert systems you see where something goes wrong and a whole slew of people get notified. This is meant for the hard core techie.
The system should have options like number of people to automatically text. You can plug in all the managers SMS addresses in these fields. Another option should be messages sent. It should be able to generate its’ own plausible messages like “Still working on it, making progress” or “May need to contact vendors next level of support”. The messages should be varied considerably at each texting interval so that it looks like you are sending the message manually. The texting interval should also be configurable.
So as you are sitting their focused on solving problems, this system sends out periodic messages to all the managers. Once you are done, you can shut it off and all of the people you report to are satisfied because they have been kept in the loop.
I hacked together something like this a few years back because I could no longer tolerate the notification requirements. It was too hard to explain to people why stopping to notify others about your progress almost killed troubleshooting efforts. Either the manager was a hard core techie and understood it instinctively, or they did not. There was really no one in between. I had a simple configuration file and some randomly generated messages. So I don’t think it would be hard to do, and put together an excellent presentation layer using a Java type program.
A real spiffy program would be very sophisticated and put the right messages in for the specific type of platform or device. It would put in the right network, database, system or application type message that seems plausible. That would eliminate unwanted inquiries from a vast majority of obnoxious managers.
Discuss and enjoy!