In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 09/21/2005 at 08:29 AM, Aaron Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/sep05/lieberman/ # Make sure that system information resides in several heads. If only one employee understands a critical system, that person might try to hold the company hostage and demand ridiculous perks to remain on staff. This can easily happen if the original system team was very small, and only one or two members stuck around to see the final product. In one consulting situation I encountered, the single knowledge holder simply didn't trust anyone else to handle critical sections of the system. Left unattended, situations like this create dangerous dependencies; the organization might be left "high-and-dry" if the individual moves to another position, retires, or even dies. The problem is real; the blame-the-victim analysis is way off base. Such situations invariably exist because management does not want to "waste" the mon ey for cross staffing and cross training. Oddly enough, some of the advice that follows this quote will tacitly help to perpetuate the problem, e.g., The languages that old systems use have fallen out of general use, and younger employees see little value in learning them. The younger employees may see little value in learning them, but management should be telling them that it is part of their jobs to learn them and should explain why. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html> We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress. (S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
