Friday January 06, 2006

Manager Bloggers? I wonder how many managers are out there Blogging at Sun? Mmm, perhaps I can take a tally by getting comments on my blog? Who knows?

Either way, managing at Sun is a pretty dynamic experience, with the business changing so fast, really passionate people (most of the time), and challenges gallore there is virtually never a quiet day. Except today perhaps.

I just spent 8 weeks integrating two previously separate teams together and have been through the process of dividing up the work, creating leads, setting goals for the coming year (if they last that long:-), and was sitting back with an empty calendar ahead of me when I realised I had nothing to do. I was done for the year of FY04. My team was off busy delivering on their work, supporting our production team through end of quarter (especially interesting in Q4), and I went 'WOW'! My team rocks! I then wrote them all an email about how well they were doing, how hard they had worked to consolidate two factories into one, how proud of them I was about how they delivered on many major projects in simply record time and without barely a hitch. I have done my job, I've allowed them to do theirs. Management can be so rewarding! The sense of accomplishment when your team can go forth without hinderance and succeed is something else. I hope other managers feel the same way.

I see very little written about management outside of the world of formal journals? I've seen very little in blogs! I mean, OK, I'm a front line manager, so I'm not an exec with bigger business initiatives on my mind (although I do have those too, I'm just no influential enough yet). I'm here because the poeple who work for me ge the work done. They're the ones saving the company money at the end of the day, because without them what would I have to do?

I had an experience this year with an employee that convinced me I was doing something useful and profound for the company. This chap was bored, demotivated, not delivering and generally getting himself a bad rep! So i decided I needed him on my team, as I knew from the past that he was a very capable chap, having integrated E10K into our California factory several years before. Anyway, I got a lot of feedback that I shouldn't bother, that he was a pain etc - I heard it all. I decided they had to be wrong. Withing two weeks of being on my team I received email praising his work, his enthusiasm, his motivation, his go get it attitude, his everything. What a turn around. I simply took the hardest project I had going at the time, made him the lead and told him to get his teeth stuck into it and gave him a couple of other guys to help him out! He recently completed that project and moved to another team where after only a few weeks I received feedback from the manager asking why I had let him go! Well he had found his path and so I let him go take it.

Well there you have it, that's my story, and that's why I like management, and that's why good management can make a difference at Sun. (2006-01-06 15:45:03.0) Permalink

Sunday October 09, 2005

MBA So I started an MBA, , up here in Oregon after much deliberation and decision making about whether the time commitment would be worth it, and I'm 4 weeks in. Well is it worth it? So far yes, it's been great to have a good and genuine reason to read and read and read, as well as learn and apply some of the stuff we learn almost immediately. For example, the first two classes are Law and Economics, which are presented at an entry level, but very interesting nevertheless to go back over some old ground (econ) and some new ground (law). Our Economics professor is actually the Oregon state economist, which is a great deal, as he lives in the real world as opposed to an Ivory tower. Law is a strange subject for the most part, more about trying to apply rule based logic to vague linguistic constructs, but fascinating in it's own way. First exercise for the reader, define reasonable. It's used a lot and is a key to a lot of cases. Anyway, it's just great to be exercising different parts of grey matter again beyond the usual meanderings of a work week as a manager, which is full of challenges, and interesting problems, but for the most part of a different nature. I hope to be able to change that by bringing some of this academia to bear on the job and spice it up a little. That's not to say that i'm bored, far from it, in fact couldn't be further from the truth, but they're not all my decisions I'm implementing and I want to have more ownership and influence. Hopefully this will help start the ball rolling in that direction. If you;ve thought about one but shied away, I understand, it's a big commitment, and apparently everyone has one already, so I've been told, but there's still a lot of value to be gained, from broadening ones perspective, which often in the narrow confines of your job you don't get to do. (2005-10-09 13:24:14.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Wednesday July 28, 2004

Deploying Solaris 10 We run our two internal factories infrastructures on Solaris - of course - and test all (except our linux products) our products using Solaris - of course - and are starting to plan our move from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10 - of course. Just looking at the list of features it's a no brainer for us to make this move a priority in our team. Just about all aspects of running a data center are tackled in some way and to some extent, and our factories are very large and dynamic data centers with products moving through them all the time. Since we perform testing here, I am particularly looking forward to the improved fault management features as these can only be beneficial to our customers as we improve the quality of our products as a result of improved diagnosis of failures during the manufacturing process. The software application and daemon monitoring will also play a key role for us as we manage the availability of not jsut the hardware but the services themselves that depend on the hardware. (2004-07-28 11:05:00.0) Permalink

Tuesday July 27, 2004

Managers Blogging ? I wonder how many people managers are out there blogging? Not enough probably. So here is a pitch for more managers to blog. I certainly get one hell of kick out of managing my team and helping and then watching them deliver qrtr after qrtr on projects that are tougher, harder and more challenging than they have ever been. Certainly as a manager, it doesn't get any tougher than managing in a tough economy, need I say more. Either way, it's something I put a lot of passion into, I love helping people be productive and grow in their careers and look back at themselves every year and see how much they have moved forward.

I also believe that good managers are a key asset to Sun, I've had a couple of iffy ones in my career but many more good ones, who have done for me what I can now do for others.

Anyway, I though I would pay a public tribute to my team, in High End Operations Engineering who have just performed incredibly this last year, helping Sun back to get back on the path to profitability, in our small way. (2004-07-27 13:42:20.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Monday June 21, 2004

What do I do? I work in High End Operations Engineering, inside our world wide operations organisation. I manage a team of SW Engineers who develop factory automation software to test our products globally. I am responsible for everything from F25K -> E4900, and the testing of the uniboard for all platoforms that support it. Working with Big Iron is fascinating, it presents many interesting challenges as these products are so phenomenal, powerful and also very complex. Our goal in the factory is to ensure our customers receive the best quality product they can, when they wan it. Our test environment relies primarily on Java Servlets to execute and schedule tasks, and then uses perl and tcl/tk to interact with our products, execute code and check results.
In reality what we do is manage a Data Center, but unlike traditional Data Centers in which the hardware remains constant or perhaps grows over time, ours is constantly changing, we have hardware coming in and then going out all the time. It is an incredibly dynamic environment.
We work very closely with many different aspects of the company and of course we use Sun products to test Sun products. We are a showcase for what you can do with Sun Technology in a manufacturing environment.
Anyway, that's what I do. (2004-06-21 12:07:07.0) Permalink Comments [1]