I think this is my very favorite story, in all the time of managing technical environments.
It was at that business, that company, that I had what I feel to be my greatest success in all of information technology, even greater than the publication of my first book. (And I'm very proud of the publication of my first book.)
As I mentioned, I was managing the technical support office of this company. I was, in addition, doing some additional management consulting, for the company overall.
One of the problems in regard to technical support was that the technical support department was far too busy. My technical support staff were heavily overburdened. They were busy taking the tech support calls, and finding solutions to the problems. They then had to document the solutions to those problems, in a very extensive database, which required you to fill out all possible situations which might encounter that problem, and might need that solution. We had to support the sales people. In addition, the company had contracted additional software, from outside developers. The technical support department was charged with quality assurance, and testing of these outside programs. Sometimes the tests got extremely involved, and you had to be very careful in documenting exactly what version you were testing, and exactly what solution it was supposed to fix, and tested against any of the recent fixes, or any problems that might be related to the problem you're encountered, in order to determine whether the outside vendor had fixed one bud, and introduced two more...
And then there was this business of creating the fonts.
This was also at the dawn of the Windows age. Windows 1 and 2 had been out for a while, but weren't having much take up, but we did have clients who were working in a Windows 1 or 2 environment. But Windows 3 had just come out, and everybody was jumping on the Windows 3 bandwagon. And because Windows 3 had just come out, everybody was playing around with fonts. Everybody wanted new fonts. The new fonts weren't scalable, as they are now. If you wanted a 9-point font, you had to create a 9-point font, even if you had an existing 10-point font. This particular company made communications software. At the time, that was primarily terminal emulation software. People were running multiple terminal windows, in Windows of various sizes, and wanted to have different size fonts in order to enable this activity. The developers, of course, felt that this was beyond their dignity as programmers, and therefore high up on the information technology food chain, and therefore passed the task off to my people in technical support.
The sales people, and marketing, wanted more and more sets of fonts. My technical support staff saw creation of fonts as something you did when you didn't have a pressing technical support call that you had to research, test out, or otherwise deal with. Oh, and also when you didn't have a new submission from the contractors to test their software.
As I said, the technical support team was completely overloaded.
There were only three female employees in the company. This was kind of par for the course for that day and age in tech companies. The Chief Financial Officer was one. She had two direct reports. One doing some bookkeeping for her, and the receptionist. Since the CFO was female, the clerical staff reported to her. They had rather little to do, and didn't really understand the technology involved in the company and product. So they felt kind of left out of everything when all the other technical people would get to discussing technical issues. Which was most of the time.
(The Chief Financial Officer was one of those people who felt it was a moral failure to smile in the workplace. She glared it everyone. It wasn't anything personal, you understand, she just glared at everyone. And she seriously protected her female employees.)
But they didn't have an awful lot to do. They were kind of bored with their jobs. They also didn't feel particularly involved in the company. After all, everybody else was working on the software. They weren't.
But the task of creating a font, in that distance day and age, was not terribly technically arduous. In reality, the creation of the fonts was not a particularly technical task. At this particular time, fonts were generally created by creating a pixel map for each character. We had a program that would allow you to specify the height and width of a character grid, and would then present you with a series of grids, of equal height and width, so that you could create a representation of a particular character. You had to go through every character from a to z, and then every capital letter from A to Z, in order to create a full bitmap of the alphabet. (And even then you were not finished: you had to do all the numeric digits, and all the special characters as well.) You chose the size of grid, in pixels, for the letter you wanted to create. Then you clicked on the pixel you wanted to turn on. You turned on all the pixels that made the grid look like a letter "e." And you had the letter "e." Then you did the same for the letter "f." It wasn't exactly a technical job. And it wasn't a demanding job. But it was time consuming.
So, I proposed to senior management that the character generation activity be given to the clerical staff.
Oh boy, did I get pushback!
This ran into all kinds of objections. The development team objected on the basis of the fact that this was part of the product, and therefore was, by definition, a technical task (and some simply because technical work was "man's work"). (Even though they didn't want to do it.) The CFO objected, more proforma than anything else, to anyone trying to suggest that her girls should be given another task, even though they spent most of their time not working terribly hard at the tasks that they had been given. It took me a month to answer all of the objections, to point out that my technical support team could train the clerical personnel, and we could at least try it, in order to see whether or not there were any major inherent problems. Finally, with much bad grace, I got an agreement that there would be a trial, of one month (and no more), for this proposal, and that if anything went wrong, I would never raise the issue again.
My guys trained the two female employees, and I let them get on with it.
I stayed out of it for a week. I didn't want to micromanage anything. I figured that my technical staff would have told me if there were any major problems. I asked my guys if the training went okay, and if the women were okay with it, and they answered in the affirmative on both counts.
But after a week, I figured I'd better at least check how things were going. I didn't go to the young ladies. I went to the CFO. I asked her if there were any problems with the trial that was underway and clerical staff doing the fonts.
She took a few seconds to think this over. And then, again looking at me as if I had caused all the evils of the world, she began to report. The clerical staff were finishing all of the tasks that she assigned them early. So that they could get on to font creation work. They were feeling, for the first time, that they were making a contribution to the product. They were taking ownership of the product. Apparently, they were asking my technical support people questions, which they fielded when they answered the general phone lines, and, heretofore, had simply passed on to the technical support team. But now they were getting into the product. They were asking to try out things on the programs. They were starting to actually use the terminal emulation software. As well as doing their font creation. They were all so very keen to see how the fonts looked on screen in real terminal emulation. For the first time, they felt like they were part of the company itself. "They are spending all afternoon creating fonts for you, and then going to your tech support guys, and the application guys, and asking if those fonts are okay."
Those young women, for the first time, felt part of the company. They were excited about the product. They were contributing to the product. They were trying out the product, so that they can see how their fonts looked, in operation. They were learning how the product worked. They were talking to other people, in other parts of the company, about the company's products. They were excited about their jobs, for the first time.
As I say, the thing that I am most proud of, in my entire IT career.
Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-518-hwyd-i-dont-have-to-admit.html
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/06/mgg-520-hwyd-we-like-it-that-way.html
No comments:
Post a Comment