From time to time managers have to supervise projects from departments they don’t belong to. This is always tricky situation, at the first place because people assigned to the project are not usually under direct control of a manager and secondly, because projects are usually focused on something else that is manager’s expertise. Example of such a situation could be when PR manager is supervising creation of a web site or when business manager is looking after a major change of content management system (CMS).

Same situation just occurred in our company and I am in the similar position as I described above. Our company is just in the middle of CMS improvement. Whole point is to make our administration work easier – I mean obviously. Currently we have two systems and we have to fill in two forms because of the catalogues. One form is for our online catalogue of exhibitors and second for our printed catalogue of exhibitors. New CMS should unify those systems together or rather create new system which will replace them. IT department specified our order and discussed all questions from a maker of the new CMS. Things were good until last Friday when the new CMS should have been finished and implemented to the testing servers. Contractor started asking new and new question which our IT department wasn’t able to answer, because they are not actually using old systems. And this a point when it gets tricky, because I had to start answering questions given in the professional langue of IT experts about things which never crossed my mind. An amount of stress generated by 12 e-mails delivered within less than one hour, written in specific terms I did not understand, is hard to describe – let’s say it’s high.

It took few hours to get into the problematic and few more hours of communicating with our IT department to find out, that contractor actually did not understand our instructions. Instead of system for catalogue entry forms, they have been changing our invoice system. If we wouldn’t find out we might have lost our full database of invoices for last few years.

So that is a pure example of the tricky decision that managers have to take from time to time. Somehow you have to be aware of at least basic aspects of everything, in order to be able to face such a situation and make correct decision.

Thanks for reading lads and see you next week.

BR, Frank Hamrozi