Our company is migrating their SharePoint sites to the new (new to us) SharePoint Online. I was nominated by my supervisor to be the site owner for our group. I have been waiting for the testing to begin and have been a little anxious because I have never worked in SharePoint, designed any apps or organized pages. I purchased a ‘For Dummies’ book and after reading half a chapter I signed up for a single license of SharePoint Online. Doing this I will be able to experiment with different site designs and functions before I deploy to the team site. I get to create my own SharePoint site, learn new things and have fun all at the same time. As of last night my thoughts on the additional responsibilities went from anxious to very excited.
Category Archives: Work
The Politics of Management – Not for me
These last four or five weeks have been very challenging for me, particularly last week.
About five weeks back our temporary manager moved back to his home state and our company president arrived at my desk soon after letting me know she was giving my name out to our customers as the new temporary manager. I wasn’t all that concerned because I know the people I work with and was quite certain I would not need to hold anybodies hands. I was looking forward to a nice quiet four or five weeks until they hired the new permanent manager.
Two weeks ago a problem, or as some would put it, an opportunity came up. This was not a serious problem and we were able to migate any adverse affects this situation would have on our customer and everyone was happy.
Last week we had a shit storm when I had taken two days off for my birthday. We had incorrect items going out to the customer with all parties involved in building and shipping these items aware of the problem with the exception of my organization. We (my people) met with program management and engineering to address the issue on Friday the 11th of August. During the meeting all the wrong decisions were made because engineering did not know the meaning of information within their own engineering. Tuesday our customer requested proof of our changes and when they could expect to see the new parts. We ended up telling them we would not be sending the new parts because of our suppliers did not provide them in time.
This is when the crap hit the fan and I was hot on it getting a rework plan in place so we could get the correct parts in time for their use at our customers and in walks program management.
These morons derail everything I had in work, going to deliver incorrect part, parts our customer does not want all because we want to keep on schedule and not delivery quality parts.
There is much more to this story but in getting to detailed I may reveal information I would rather keep to myself. Suffice to say, schedule is king and screw quality and safety.
JavaScript training is going good. I have found that if there is an error in a .js file the script won’t run in the .html. There is no error generated, it just does not run or stops at the error point. Then you need to hunt the error down. Not as friendly as CSharp error wise but I am enjoying it. I have started using the .js files instead of embedding the JavaScript code into the html file as I think this is how it should be done all the time. At the same time I am going to start getting familiar with css files and create a little website while learning all of this great stuff.
Bob has left the building
Last Monday, 10/31/2016, seemed like a normal day. For four days in a row dating back to last week I have beaten Bob into work. We had our normal discussions about our weekend activities, he had moved into a new house a month ago and I moved into my apartment a week ago. At around seven am our manager came and asked Bob to visit in his office. For some reason I sensed something was not right. Within 30 minutes our lead was summoned to his office, Bob was still absent and after a wait of 15 or 20 minutes Bob returned with our lead and started packing his things.
Bob had been laid off…. WTF??
He attended the change board meeting professionally, at the end said his good byes much to the surprise of everyone in attendance and by 11:30 he left.
I asked him if they gave any sort of reason and he said something about the company not doing financially well and it was a ‘Reduction in Force’, this is the new name for being laid off.
I am going to call bullshit on this one. Sure, they laid off others that same day, a contract worker from our group and other from other groups however we just hired two new people, one has been here three months and the other three weeks. Bob on the other hand has been here nine years next month, nine years; and they keep the new hires and let him go. I can hear the sucking sound of the knowledgebase leaving. How can you possibly justify that? I think there is more to this than everyone is saying and I find the situation quite frightening.
The next day, Tuesday 11/01/2016, we had a meeting our group thought would be to discuss the layoffs and the ramification of same. The meeting turned out to be about he ramifications only, as in who would be doing what and how much of Bob’s work each of us would get and I ended up with a very large portion. What was more apparent, I believe to most of us is Bob’s layoff did not seem to have anything to do with a ‘Reduction in Force’ as management has been saying. I say this because our manager spoke about our other contract labor leaving with the time frame given of a year or two with the additional hiring of one or two additional people described as buffer people or people to help out where needed. This in no way sounds like any kind of reduction in force.
On a good note, along with getting a very large portion of Bob’s work I was also told I would be starting a Project Management class in January. This would be after work, completely paid for by the company and I was picked for this class by our manager. The extra work and class removes a bit of the frightening aspect of this very unexpected change to our work environment.