Keep the managers out of the system – Please!

Throughout my enterprise IT career I have had a variety of managers, some bad, some good and some great.

One of the main philosophys I try to make sure my managers live by is “Stay out of the system and I’ll be able to keep it running”, but you always get a lose cannon or two in your career, and I have had two.

When I had just started at a large enterprize media company in the late 90’s, I had a manager who was assigned to our group because basically we didn’t have anyone else, and I certainly wasn’t qualified. So, OK, this guy (we’ll call him Bill) was assigned as our manager of the email group.

We ran a shop of Exchange 5.5 servers, servicing aproximately 4500 clients. One of the things Bill insisted on was having full access to Exchange and the domain the servers were in. I asked why would a manager (who knows nothing of running a system like Exchange) need access to the system, and his reply “Don’t ask, just do it!”. OK Bill, you now have access.

About a week later, one of our systems alerted that it was being rebooted. I called Bill and asked if he knew anything about it:

Me: Bill, we just got an alert that serverX rebooted, you know anything about this?

Bill: Yea, it wasn’t working right, so I rebooted the server

Me: You what? Why would you reboot the server?

Bill: Don’t worry about it.

Me: What do you mean don’t worry about it?

Bill: Just deal with it!

I mentioned this incident to our (then) Operations manager. Suffice it to say, Bill was not longed to be our manager much longer.

A few managers came and went until we merged with another large media company, and I got another new manager (we’ll call him BennyV). He had a few more qualifications than Bill in running Exchange, but my philosophy still applied, why do managers need access to the system. Well BennyV would have nothing of it, again, he (seriously) demanded access to the environment.

Luckly for us, BennyV wasn’t as stupid as Bill and never really got into the system to do things, he just liked the satisfaction of knowing he had the keys to the kingdom. We did however have a fun time one evening with him and our team.

Seems BennyV told management that the Exchange password was not all that secure (it wasn’t but it was the least of our security concerns). So he promissed management we would change it.  Now obviously BennyV (being the guru of Exchange that he was) didn’t realize the work involved in doing this, but none the less, we setup a team task to change the Exchange password on 20+ servers in one of our sites.

During the task, the entire messaging team and BennyV were on the phone. Also, we had a group IM chat going, which did not include BennyV. Here is an exerpt from that chat:

Group member 1: Hey, does anyone know what the new password is going to be

Me: I’m generating that now, stand by

Group member 2: I have an idea

Group memeber 2: K33pB33nYV0Ut

Group member(x): smilies

(Now for those of you who don’t speek l33t (leet speak), that translates to Keep BennyV out.)

When our team member wrote that in the chat, I started laughing so hard I almost cried. All BennyV could say is “Whats so funny? Whats so Funny?”, which of course made me laugh even harder. It set the mood that night, for what could have been a long, and very boring task, but having that fun in the beginning made it all worth while.