My mother used to say, “If I only knew then what I know now.” This annoyed me very much because I thought that I knew it all. Fast forward four decades and I now find myself thinking, if not outwardly expressing, the same sentiment. My high school French teacher used to say, “Experience is a dear teacher.” Today I think that we can only hope to learn and grow no matter how old we are.
In my past life, I worked at a company that had a fairly stable product and it was a great place to cut my teeth in healthcare IT. Our product suite was mature, dependable, and I knew it like the back of my hand; in fact, they called me the TRENDSTAR guru. Life was good.
As with many a mature product in this world of rapidly changing technology, our software became dated. CIOs were demanding solutions that were Windows compatible, scalable, and ran UNIX or Linux. We decided to rewrite nearly all of the modules, which was no easy feat. We went from masters of our universe to masters of absolutely nothing. To make matters worse, there was so much lost functionality and so many bugs that things could get pretty ugly. Anything that could go wrong, did go wrong and often at the worst possible time.
I was assigned to a long-time, old-technology customer who had been convinced by sales to migrate to the new system. They were in the middle of budget preparation and their system kept crashing. I logged a support case and quickly escalated it. The ticket sat in the queue for many weeks. I assured the customer that the ticket was escalated and support was aware of it, which was true, but the customer sensed and I suspected that it had not been touched. It’s a well-known fact that if every support case is high priority, then nothing is high priority.
My manager suggested that I contact the vice president of services and support. In all my years with the old system, I never had to escalate anything to the VP level. The only time I talked to a VP was at the annual summer picnic over a beer and a burger. I was sure that the solution was just a phone call away.
Here’s how it went:
“Connie here.”
“Hello. This is Deb Zaino with implementation services. “
“Hi Deb.”
“I need your help. I am working with St. Joseph’s Healthcare and we have run into a problem where their system crashes at least once a day and they lose their work. The help desk ticket has been in the support queue for seven weeks. The customer is in the middle of budget development and they are stressed because they are falling behind.”
Connie – “What’s your action plan?”
Silence. . . More silence. You could have heard a mouse hiccup! I wondered, “Was I supposed to solve this? Wouldn’t I have already solved it if I had the power and ability to do so?” Part of me was hoping to make a good impression with Connie, but I truly was expecting Connie to have an action plan. It was rather embarrassing.
Now that I have a bit more experience dealing with leadership, I have ideas as to what Connie might have been doing. In retrospect, I think she wasn’t close enough to the issue to have a solution and was looking to me, the “expert”. Another possibility is that she was employing a technique that can be used to deal with a complainer – Ask the naysayer for ideas to address the issue.
I still cringe when I think of that phone conversation, but it did make me a better project manager. When I seek support from leadership, I take time to prepare for the discussion. I try to be succinct in describing the problem. I do my best to bring a solution to the table or at least come prepared to discuss all possible solutions that my team and I have considered. And of course, I need to make it clear what I want from leadership.
Have you ever wished for, or better still, had the opportunity for a do-over?