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By Joel Trammell
In the NetQoS offices, I can often be found out of my office, walking around and just talking to people in the different departments of the company. This practice has unofficially been dubbed “Joel’s management by walking around thing.” It seems to work. Employee satisfaction is high, employee turnover is low, and revenues are up.
In any management exercise, you have a number of things going on that you are, by definition, responsible for. This is true for both people management and network management. You couldn’t function if you didn’t trust your people or trust your tools to do something without you being there to make it happen.
But you do have to constantly verify (as in the Cold War phrase “Trust, but verify,”) that what you need to have happen actually happens. So, what’s the best way to do that?
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In the people management area, the information you receive as CEO or the head of your department is very filtered, because if you sit in your office, you only hear what the people who report directly to you tell you, and they only hear what the people reporting to them tell them. That may work for many things, but some of the most interesting things in the organization aren’t uncovered that way. Nobody wants to pass bad news to their boss. Inevitably, you find things out only by engaging people directly.
And when “walking around” there are always things you uncover and areas you can improve. For example, at one point in time, we had three different groups at NetQoS all working on designing a software wizard to be used in three different products. The three groups didn’t know that they were duplicating each other’s work, and we eventually were able to design one wizard, used in the three products. By engaging at that level, you’re able to save a great deal of time and effort.
If you want to find out the best way to put a bolt in a car, you ask the guy who does it every day, not a VP who hasn’t touched a bolt in twenty years, if ever. If you want to know what’s going on, you have to talk to the people that do it. Otherwise you end up in a big game of “telephone” – a game that suspiciously turns “massive piles of stinking manure” into “outstanding quantities of phosphorus-rich fertilizer” and rarely the other way around.
The same thing is true for network management. While you hope you have an alarm system in place, to let you know when things are going badly, often actively looking around, “walking around” in the network, you can identify key issues before they become major problems. And the goal of management is to solve problems as soon as possible – that requires a very active engagement, searching and seeing if there’s smoke anywhere that might indicate a potential future forest fire. Otherwise, if you wait for the people or the systems to tell you, you’ll have to deal with the situation after it’s become a major problem.
