Supporting Managers

Rules of Thumb: Supporting Managers

Rule of Thumb 26: At your site, system administration is whatever the boss tells the admins it is.

Corollary 1: Users will bypass admins to get the boss to tell the admins something different. That’s their right.

Corollary 2: The person who does your job review makes the rules. The good admins always follow those rules. But see the “Rule of Rules and Laws”

Rule of Thumb 27: The Rule of Rules and Laws: Any rule can be modified by the application of power and policy. By contrast, rules are always subordinate to laws. Note that this rule is a rule, not a law.

Rule of Thumb 28: That Site Isn’t This Site: The situation at your site doesn’t make you qualified to judge the situation at another site and vice versa.

Corollary 1: Just because someone else’s support staff does it doesn’t mean your staff can (or should) do it.

Policy and Power

Rule of Thumb 29: Most admins live in a policy vacuum. This can be good or bad.

Corollary 1: Power expands to fill a vacuum. That thing which expands most easily is a gas.

Corollary 2: Anything that expanded to fill a vacuum is easily displaced by a solid.

Corollary 3: A rapidly moving solid will hurt you if you’re in its way.

Rule of Thumb 30: Be careful what you do in a policy vacuum. Nobody appointed you god. However, you can always be dis-appointed.

Budgeting

Rule of Thumb 31: System administration and user support are overhead. Cutting them increases costs, because users will do their own administration at a higher cost than before.

Corollary 1: Training is overhead. Cutting it increases costs, because people take longer to do their jobs.

Corollary 2: Cutting immediate, visible costs and raising subtle, long-term costs is rarely an appropriate strategy, but it’s always a tempting one.

Resource Allocation

Rule of Thumb 32: Pareto’s Law: 20 percent of the customers account for 80percent of the turnover, 20 percent of the components account for 80 percent of the cost, and so on.

Corollary 1: The 20 percent of the users who use 80 percent of the resources are never the same 20 percent who have 80 percent of the authority in the organization, the most frequent 20 percent of the messages are not the most interesting 20 percent, and so on.

Praise and Brickbats

Rule of Thumb 33: Excellence increases demands. Critics gather to spot tinier flaws as work nears perfection. Promptness invites impatience. In correspondence, the faster you answer, the faster they answer, ad infinitum.

Rule of Thumb 34: First impressions only count when it hurts. If you get it right the first time, nobody remembers. If you get it wrong the first time, nobody forgets.

Rule of Thumb 35: Advice is often valued by what you paid for it. The guy who takes you out to lunch ‘to chat about a problem’ never follows your advice. The guy who paid $250 an hour for it always listens to it. He may not follow it, but he listens to it.

Rule of Thumb 36: Your client thinks you’re brilliant if you solve the problem, and an idiot if you don’t. This holds regardless of the actual difficulty level of the problem; you are an idiot if you can’t do real time processes on a Sun 2, and a genius if you plug the machine in and it works.