On 08/11/2010 07:55 AM, Jefferson Cowart wrote: > I think it's somewhere in between. I'm not sure how much control I'll > have into budget and such, but I believe I'll be the one responsible for > performance evaluations and such. I'll certainly confirm this with my > manager.
I'm in a similar situation as you, but have no control over my team's performance evaluations (read: salary) and they know it. This backfired a few times because I'm easily sidetracked by people who do have that control. Not once I found them fixing C*O laptop while production servers were down. Pay attention not to fall in the same trap, although I'm not really sure how to avoid it ;) > On that note, any suggestions on how to get people to write [good] > documentation? Others in our teams seem to be very resistant to writing > even basic documentation. (There are a couple services we provide that I Lead by example and make sure to make a good point (even exaggerate a bit) every time lack of documentation was to blame for a certain blunder. "Test" your documentation often, i.e. if you have 10 servers to install, don't give them all to the same person, have one person install one, document the installation and then hand the rest to someone else, preferably have all of them take turns. > don't have documentation on what system hosts the database.) I'd guess > I've written 90%+ of the documentation on our wiki. While everyone > agrees it's a good idea, no one makes the time to write it. Same here, but that percentage *will* gradually decrease. It takes time and a lot of patience. A lot. It took 3+ years for my share of company wiki to drop below 80% ;) > In addition to that any suggestions on how to handle things along the > lines of "this person is weak in area xyz; how do I get him up to speed > on that?" Put him on the line of fire, thats the best way ;) Make every week (day, half day, whatever) a different person a primary contact for everything. Not only it will serve as what I think Tom calls "interruption shield", but every time that person escalates something to you, you can always point him to the documentation and ask them to figure it out on their own. After you do it a couple of times, the habit will develop itself. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
