Cleaning Up Someone Else’s Mess
September 25, 2000 by Eric Svetcov
You finish the interview process and have received the offer of your dreams (or at least something acceptably above your former position). Your hopes are high and you are ready to take off running at your new job....and then reality hits.
They forgot to mention during your interview process that nobody ever bothered to buy any software, the production e-mail server doesn’t have mirrored hard drives, much less a large RAID array that can accommodate growth over time, or maybe they just “forgot” to mention that sure, you’re starting in April, but the person before you has already spent the entire year’s budget (on what, you’re not exactly sure).
However you cut it, the day you start at your brand new IT job, the typical new job honeymoon is over.
So, how do you deal with this new found horror show?
That’s a tough question....
Managers: The first thing you need to do is a little triage. Don’t do anything for the first few days. Simply walk around and make a list of issues. Talk with managers and workers. Find out what works and doesn’t work. Before you can fix the problems, you need to find out what your users think is broken.....and let me give you a hint, find the administrative assistants and engineers. If you give them a chance to unload, it will feel like you’re standing in front of a fire hose.
Once you create the list, that’s when it’s time to speak with the other folks in IT. If you are managing the IT team, then get your group together and ask them to list the IT problems they see in the company. As they complete this process, cross out the problems you wrote down on your list that they cover, then ask them to add the problems you found but they did not list. Take an hour or two to prioritize the combined list and have your team assign estimated costs to fix the problem and the amount of time it will take (Note: If your team is responsible for support as well as projects, make sure you double the time estimates....folks working on these problems will be constantly interrupted to take care of daily support issues).
When you are adding the items you found that your new staff didn’t mention, be diplomatic. Do not assign blame. Mention the items and ask their opinion. If you were fair in your assessment and your staff is fair, there shouldn’t be any trouble discussing the items in question They will recognize your additional problems or you will see that the problems you saw really aren’t that big a deal.
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