So, as an IT tech, it is amazing how you can see poor decisions being made.
The one that comes to mind is the where I last worked at.
The company's VP of IT is leaving... So a decision is made to promote someone within the company to run the IT department. Who gets picked to run the department of IT? Not one of the four guys who have been in the IT department for 9-10 years... Not a VP who might have some IT experience or again, one of the four guys with over 10 years of IT experience...
A 27-28 year old person who started in marketing, goes into inventory, and becomes some planning manager gets picked. No IT experience, and with the rumor that he was 'recommended' by the VP of IT as a joke.
Suffice it to say, ever had to deal with a person with no IT experience trying to run an IT department?
Here is an example of a train wreck waiting to happen:
You have a person who is only familiar with some aspects of the company, mostly in marketing and inventory of the company. A person who believes he has a better grasp of the company than anyone else. Now take said person, and give him a job that allows him to direct IT to do whatever he wants, he just has to run it. It's like giving a kid the keys to a toy store and telling him to run it. He will only care about what he wants, and others will just have to accept it.
Well, this happened. One decision was, "Hey, let's go redo this server room. Clean it up and rewire everything."
Great idea. Only one problem... No redundancy for the business to afford a lot of down time.
His response, "Well, we will be down a day... No big deal, it is for the good of the company."
Ok... As long as they know that...
But wait, it gets better. The company has a call center, that accesses some of the servers. We get told that we will plan to do this server redo next weekend. But wait, was this worked out with other departments? NOPE.
What's real fun is also how he handled the situation... We informed the Call Center about this plan and they said this can't happen, because they have scheduled people 2 weeks in advance, they can't afford to have servers down because they were not prepared for this. When he heard about this, he tried to end run around the manager to push it through. Luckily, the person above that manager had sense enough to state that this had to be worked out with the call center manager.
Another problem this 'director' had, is his inability to listen and reasonably plan out things. As you can see above, he never really bothered to talk to other departments or see how it would affect people. One of his 'great' ideas is to make departments pay for their IT needs. Which for Finance, it was great... But for the other departments, which were not told about this... Found it to be a shock to their budgets... And most wouldn't have had an issue, had it been discussed to them before hand.
Another good example of inability to listen: Explaining migration of Windows Servers, namely, going from an older Windows System to a Newer one. It is generally recommended to do a clean install of a Windows Server OS and run things parallel. We had an old Windows 2000 server running some business critical systems. He wanted to upgrade it to the latest and greatest. I informed him the proper way to do it, but he wouldn't hear that it isn't the best way... Truly professional to ignore your own staff and treat them like they don't know what they are talking about when you, yourself, don't know enough about IT.
So now the question is... How sane is it for people to keep a director in a position he is not suited for or in this case, making the department that has supported the company, no longer care about the company's well being?
Well, sadly, the company is still having said person running the department. Two of those people, myself included, are no longer with the company. One of the two remaining people are frustrated and wants to be fired.
So people, if you see something like this happening... It's time to bail the ship. When the monkeys want to run the show, it is something bound to go down burning.
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