Good Management Decisions
If you read my earlier posts Changes at Work and Managing through change, then you know that we have just completed a change in ownership at work and tensions are high. This week was a little better than last management communicated well and made every attempt to address the fears of the organization.
Our new senior management became aware that the decision to move our production computing environments to their current data center in another state had been communicated to the masses and this prompted a set of meetings to try and calm the folks down and communicate their intentions. For the most part, Senior management succeeded in calming the folks down, however some of us are still skeptical.
Our CIO pulled together a meeting of all managers and directors to discuss the impact and to try and alleviate any fears. This was a good move and I would have done the same thing, however it was obvious to most of us, that our CIO is not in the new senior management decision making process, and that has some of us concerned. Our CIO let us know that the new Senior Management team would be onsite the following day to speak with all IT folks. This was a good move and really calmed down my staff.
Senior Management let us know that they had hoped that the long term strategy for the production environments could have been communicated differently with an emphasis on the actual deployment timeframe along with a resource impact statement. They stated that their staff was just beginning our Integration planning process and that we would be involved in that, however the new team was still in the process of integrating a company that they acquired 2004 and they were concentrating their efforts on completing the 2004 integration.
They emphasized that the timeframe for most of the migrations to another data center would be 12 to 18 months and they need us for the migration and support after the migration. Their support strategy was to perform remote support from our facility to their facility. With the right infrastructure (network, kvm, monitoring tools) this is certainly possible.
I was pleasantly surprised to see how genuine they appeared. There were no airs about them and there was no spin. They answered all questions and spoke easily and openly. This meeting relieved some of my fears, and now I feel comfortable that I will have a job in January, however I am still skeptical about my long term future with this company.
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