#47: Failure of Management 😔

Feeling Ready is Overrated 📉

I went for a walk in the rain to test how waterproof my gear is. It passed :)

மாலை வணக்கம், Buenas Noches, and Good Evening from rainy New York City!

With the itchy palms - ready to get this money

I’ll be sharing a thing I did, a tweet I liked, and a thought I had.

A Thing 🎥

I published 6 videos in the CNLT series on Youtube.

1. CNLT 8 | Connecting Word "Or" | Colloquial Northern Lanka Tamil

2. CNLT 9 | Adverbial Participle | Colloquial Northern Lanka Tamil

3. CNLT 10 | Talking about ___ | Colloquial Northern Lanka Tamil

4. CNLT 11 | I get stressed | Colloquial Northern Lanka Tamil

5. CNLT 12 | Simultaneous Case | Colloquial Northern Lanka Tamil

In CNLT 13, you can see me comparing two things in Tamil. Super proud of myself for how smoothly I did that during conversation.

My goal is to make these videos findable. When you google “Learn Sri Lankan Tamil”, my roadmap will show up first.

The next person won’t have to cobble it together from disparate sources like I did. It’ll be straightforward.

I will leave the world better than I found it.

A Tweet 🐦

Isabel shares excellent insights regularly

I didn’t feel ready to teach the mentor series in Small Bets.

I felt like the least qualified teacher in the batch.

My goal was for each student to leave with 1 small bet and 2 new friends. Of the 30 people that joined, maybe 5 achieved this.

I was one.

If I had waited until I felt “ready”, I wouldn’t have created the CNLT series. I wouldn’t have coined the probabilistic chain. I wouldn’t be able to say “I’ve taught a class on the internet”.

For years, I’ve known I wanted to teach. I was waiting until I felt “ready”.

But opportunity always presents itself at the correct moment.

Big thank you to Small Bets for this opportunity. I highly recommend you consider joining. It’s the livest online community I’m a part of.

They say you’re the average of the 5 people you hang out with the most.

Nothing is more inspiring than being surrounded by people trying stuff before they feel ready.

A Thought 💭

Last week at my job, I consulted on an RCA for an app team.

RCA stands for root cause analysis. After a failure of a software system, it’s important to figure out 

1. why it happened 

2. how it won’t happen again

The app runs on devices managed by another team.

The device team pushed a firmware update to the devices that did not install properly. This rendered the app unreachable. Thus, unusable.

So in the morning, when users tried to open the app, they reported that the app was down.

Given the user impact, the app team produced an RCA.

While reviewing the app team’s RCA, I discovered the device team never produced an RCA for their failed firmware push.

The failed firmware update had affected most, but not all devices. From the unaffected devices, the app was working as expected.

So I asked, “where is the device team’s RCA?”

The app team responded, “They rarely produce one, and it’s usually only a verbal commitment.”

So I said, “So this has happened before - where’s the paper-trail?”

They responded with “Huh?”

In any organization, a paper-trail establishes a written chronology of events. 

So I responded, “Where is the request for an RCA - with detailed expectations of what it should contain?”

The app team responded, “We sent it but the device team never responded”.

“Did you escalate this with your management?” I asked.

“Yes, but we don’t know what happened afterward. We never got the RCA from the device team.”

The app team spoke about it as if this was their failure. I reminded them in an organization, it’s critical to identify what is within your control and what isn’t. At the point peer-to-peer communication with another team breaks down, and the situation escalates to management - that is outside of your team’s control.

At that point, it’s a failure of management.

If the app team manager were excellent, they would have reiterated the written request to the device team manager. And if the device team manager never responded, the app team would have captured it in the paper-trail.

Then the escalation would need to go up a level of management.

Not die on the vine like a sad tomato.

Constructing a paper-trail of the chronology of correspondence, actions, and escalations is a key part of inter-team communication.

It creates levers for accountability.

True leaders realizes how powerful this paper-trail is.

I’ve done this dozens of times. Many times, my management has failed to follow through. But at least a few times, when I had excellent management, this paper-trail was what my management needed to enforce an optimal outcome.

One time my escalation went up 3 levels of management up before an optimal resolution was achieved.

That resolution enforced an app team to use a NoSQL database to power their new apps. It scaled effortlessly. Otherwise, that app team would have used an un-sharded SQL database that would bottleneck at 20% scale because that’s the way they’ve always done it.

That resolution saved the entire division years of redone work. It got folks on that app team promoted. It established to my management that I am not afraid of speaking up for the optimal outcome.

That I can be trusted to “Do The Right Thing”.

Me and Mookie - two peas in a pod.

Your current manager will not always be your manager. You won’t always be on this team. But the habits you practice will stay with you.

A paper-trail needs to be one of those habits.

Because when management isn’t a failure, you’ll be ready to capitalize on it.

With Love,
Janahan

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