From the Archive - Welcome Aboard

‘Tales From the Trenches’ is a series of real-life anecdotes from my career. Because some stories just need telling!

I walked into a new company to start an assignment as the Technical Services Manager. As I was walking down a corridor looking for my office, a young man walked right up to me, stood right in front of me, face to face, and asked if I was Russell Futcher. “Yes” I replied. He then said, “don’t think you’re going to tell us what to f***ing well do” and turned around and walked off.”

This was a large corporate with an IT Technical Services Division of about 40 internal staff, handling desktops, servers, global email and networking. They had appalling service delivery, constant email drop outs, network failures and angry customers.

My assignment

I was hired to fix the problems and bring them up to world’s best practice.

One business office complained to me so loudly and bitterly and with every bit of colourful language at their disposal, that their email was more down than up and that this had been going on for a year. I asked the Email Administrator to attend to it and come back to me and tell me what the issue was. He proudly came back and said “I have turned off their email server. Now they have nothing to complain about”.

The culture

Cowboys dominated this corporation - all men, no women allowed, a law unto themselves, and they had burned several managers before I arrived. There was no customer service, no service of any kind actually. No work management system, no inter-team integration, no connection with Service Desk, no process, and work was only completed based on mate’s rates.

The outcome

I fixed their problems, changed the culture and introduced very good service delivery. Backlogs were cleared, all work was now subject to process, low incidence of rework and staff were properly trained. I installed ITIL service delivery and transitioned the team to a Performing Team (not High-Performance, I ran out of time). Staff and customers were now happy.

Postscript

As for the young man who greeted me when I arrived?

I was sitting in my office one day and the Security Manager came in with two very large burly men. He asked if I could go and get a certain young man. I asked why and he only replied that all would be revealed shortly. He didn’t introduce the two large men.

I brought back the young man, who was arrested on the spot by the two Federal Police - detectives. This young man was wanted by the CIA for major hacking activities. Never saw him again.

Now here is the tragedy. This young man had a brilliant mind, his technical skills were extraordinary to say the least. His attitude however was arrogant and belittling. He was running his little enterprise from work and I was slowly making ground with him. I’m not sure I can explain why, but I admired this guy in some ways.