In my freshly started little series of ‘recycled email correspondence’, here is a little piece on how you should behave in what I call a paper mill environment, meaning larger companies or bureaucratic organizations like the United Nations, for example. The advice that I give you in this little article won’t get you far in a startup company, but it will help you to survive in ‘Cubicle Land’.
During my time in the United States, my co-workers had introduced me to an acronym called CYA: (C)over (Y)our (A)ss. This means that whenever a project comes your way, you should follow the unwritten CYA guidelines to prevent your head from ending on a silver plate for the faults of someone on a higher pay grade than yours.
The relatively safe procedure in a corporate environment always goes more or less like this:
- Clearly define and write down your business requirements.
- Identify a budget and its size.
- Compile the information and write a MEMO(!) to your supervisor.
- Once he has agreed in writing or through his signature on the specifications in that memo, you can enter the next phase.
- Compare the specified requirements with the actual feature lists of possible available products and the existing environment and resources in place at your company.
- Write a memo with a recommendation based upon that comparison, carefully valuing pros and cons, the estimated time frame for deployment and, most importantly, the expected costs!
- If you don’t trust your supervisor – and you never should trust a supervisor – CC or BCC your supervisor’s supervisor in your correspondence.
- Let your supervisor make a decision in writing. An email usually is good enough for work instruction.
- If he gives you free hand to make a decision on your own, base it only on justifiable business facts, not on any fancy ideas or delusional phantasies about the freedom of Open Source.
I cannot stretch this enough: Don’t trust your supervisor, and unless it is an emergency or daily routine, ONLY ACT UPON WRITTEN INSTRUCTIONS. Especially when there are many work hours to be burned or budget to be spent or legal issues like expensive software licensing involved. For example, if you have to purchase expensive Microsoft licenses, it never hurts to give Microsoft a call and ask them for a statement about the legal situation and the required software licenses – I do this all the time, just to be on the safe side.
And read Dilbert and take it seriously. The Dilbert cartoons by Scott Adams are closer to reality than you might think.
Still want to be an administrator? 😉