“consultants will say anything”
2011/09/18
“the one thing government seldom gets is honest advice from consultants. Let’s face it, many consultants will say anything they have to in order to be called back.”
Gene Woolsey, from Real World Operations Research.
(←)
Well, having responsibility without authority is stressful enough to cause that. It has been written before, but this graph from TimeBack Management says it better:
authority vs responsibility
It also happens that 3/4 of this graph explain typical Public Sector employee behavior.
Comments from both users and fellow system administrators are welcome.
It is Sysadmin Day today!
2011/07/29
Your sysadmin, 2010/11/07
Aiming for failure
2011/07/25
Thanks to @gtzi the following quote by Herbert Swope came to my attention:
Just like your Postmaster, or your System Administrator, be him either junior or senior. Impossible tasks and system administration go hand-in-hand…
Note to self:
VBoxManage modifyvm "VM name" --natpf1 "host-to-guest-ssh,tcp,,2222,,22"
Now you can ssh into 127.0.0.1 port 2222 and log into the virtual machine.
[details]
Management and the Public Sector
2011/05/15
Overheard this weekend:
The Number One rule of management in the Greek Public Sector is: “If you want something done, assign it to someone who already has too many assignments and is overloaded”.
This closely follows my decade long observation that management works with those who work, leaving the rest at peace.
Dimitris sent me “The Deadline” as a gift for my birthday. Written by Tom DeMarco (author of “Peopleware“) it is a novel that aims to introduce the reader to the complicate and cruel world of software project management. It also explains why most software projects fail. Clearly. In a buy-this-book-for-your-manager-to-open-his-eyes way. Team formation, design, quality control, unrealistic deadlines, goals and schedules, it is all in there. So if you need psychological support when a project goes bad, you should read the book. It is a good bus read.
It is also a book that opens doors to new worlds. Thanks to the book I learned about the adventures of Mr. Tompkins by George Gamow in which he aims to explain modern scientific theories to a popular audience. I see my stack of unread books getting higher again. I also learned about iThink which seems pretty cool (but then again I find Systems Thinking interesting enough). Pity though that iThink costs as much as it does (should I write my half-baked hack of systems thinking software? Damn! When I cannot buy, I try to write code instead and thus pay in time).
What would I change in the book? I would completely discard the very last chapter. Totally unnecessary. But no harm done, since the story is only the vehicle for the project management message and the message does get through. I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with managers like Mr. Tompkins; for this I want to end this post with the very first notes in Mr. Tompkins’s journal:
Four essentials of Good Management:
- Get the right people
- Match them to the right jobs
- Keep them motivated
- Help their teams to jell and stay jelled
(All the rest is Administrivia)
Amen to that!
Never press the “Send” button
2011/03/03
This is one of the most useful pieces of advice ever given to me, and it happened 15 years ago:
- Never press the “Send” button when you are angry. Get up from your chair and take a walk instead.
15 years ago I pressed the button. Then N.P. came to me with the advice above. Thank you N.P.
So you wrote ci passwd instead of vi passwd and you lost your password file.
DO NOT PANIC!
Type co passwd and bring it back.
And now that you’ve cooled down you can read rcsintro(1).
