http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/06/web-operations-culture-part1.html
"The CEO cannot shout or fire the website back up. The CFO cannot account, control, or audit the website back up and the Chief Council cannot sue it back to life." (and so on.)
I dunno if I agree entirely with this. Back when I worked at the airline, we moved our headquarters from out by the airport to downtown - a bit of a nightmare, since airlines have some really esoteric communications setups (Telex and other oddities), which had been in place so long nobody in the airline *or* the local telco had a clue about them.
And the equipment was so old you couldn't find spares (no, I'm not at all sure what would have happened if something ever failed), so we just had to hope the new lines were connected properly, with no way to test them until the actual move.
Naturally, most weren't.
This involved a lot of calling up of the local telco and trying to get them to move in a timely fashion - we needed "repairs" in hours, not days, since we were paying another airline's dispatch department a hefty fee to cover our outage, and the FAA would get testy if it was more than a brief period. One of the most effective methods to escalate our tickets, and one we used sparingly, was to get our owner/CEO on the phone. He was really good at shouting, "We have to get these things connected! WE HAVE PLANES IN THE AIR!" (He opted not to explain the distinction between air traffic control and dispatch.)
So, y'know: There are times the CEO *can* shout your website back up. Or at least your Telex.
You can only set priorities
btilly on 2008-06-16T05:19:28
You can't make things happen faster than they can. Furthermore people who are shouted at over things that are beyond their control might get motivated once, but they also get motivated to find another job. And finally the more technical the person, the less likely they are to be motivated by shouting.
I remember a previous job where I set up monthly report to mail to our clients. First month, great. Second month, great. Third month? I got to work and everyone was saying, "Why is your report broken, drop everything you're doing and fix it right away!"
Huh? OK, I went over to sit down with the product manager who had specced the report and we were beginning to go through how he knew it was wrong when the head of product came by and began literally yelling at me that I had broken the report, our customers thought we were idiots as a result and it needed to be fixed no later than this afternoon. I responded that I was still trying to find out what was wrong with it, and it would be fixed when it got fixed. He yelled back that what was wrong was that I broke it and it needed to be fixed by this afternoon at the latest. I pointed out that I hadn't
touched said report in over 2 months and said he had a choice, I could go back to working on the report, or continue listening to him shout. He went away to take it up with my boss.
The result? I found out that a DBA had screwed up a nightly copy a month ago. (See, I said it wasn't me!) The dataset that needed to be copied was fairly large, and was going to take several days. I went back to the product manager, gave him a realistic expectation of when it would be fixed and offered to send an apologetic email to go to everyone who got the bad report. The decision was made to just explain the situation to those who called, and several days later we sent out the corrected data set.
The further result? I went to my boss to ask how I should handle telling the head of product that this afternoon was not going to happen. He said it was taken care of. Turns out that my boss and the head of product had had a "heated exchange" about it. Furthermore even though I never again had a negative interaction with the head of product, when he went on to other companies, I was happy. And despite it being made clear to me that I was welcome to join said companies, I never have had the slightest interest in doing so. OTOH the boss that stood up for me? Guess who I followed to my current employer?
:-)
Re:You can only set priorities
wirebird on 2008-06-17T15:31:13
Yeah, but you can bump the priorities. In our case, they pulled a guy out of retirement (at, I'm sure, a hefty consultation fee) to properly install the line.
Of course, in that case the shouting was merely conveying the actual urgency of the situation (okay, it may not be air traffic control, but the FAA *does* require dispatch to be up and receiving data whenever a plane is in the air) to a company that wasn't willing to acknowledge it otherwise.
The same CEO did have an annoying tendency to shout at/fire his own employees, though. He only tried that on me once... and despite being smart enough to delegate so there wasn't direct shouting, and to merely threaten to demote me rather than actually fire me (even though everyone knew he'd retract it in the time it took you to walk back to your desk), it failed. Buh-bye!
(Followed, naturally, by hefty consultation fees. Instant karma.)
And one thing the article didn't mention...
hex on 2008-06-17T15:03:43
Users can't complain the website back up. No matter how popular their blog is.
:-)
