New Role at Work
Staggeringly, I'll have been at my job for 13.5 years on November 20. I've been in my current management role for 3.5 years, with a major expansion of my management duties 2 years ago. Then things started going so well that by 1.5 years ago I was pretty consistently suffering from ennui.
Shortly thereafter I took over a huge cross-departmental effort with reasonable success. That effort continues to this day, and has alleviated much of the ennui I documented, and led to me starting a lot of other initiatives to improve the department, in particular the release process for our software. Most of these initiatives were the sort of long complicated multi-step process that we'd been particularly bad at as a company, but it turned out that I was actually pretty effective at shepherding those through to completion. I actually started spending most of my time on that sort of work instead of what I was officially supposed to be doing, which worked out fine because I have three very competent team leads and many more competent team members who could take things and run with them.
Since I wasn't really spending much time on my official job, and one of my team leads was more than ready to fill my role, I needed to find other position. After some surprisingly helpful career counseling from HR and a lot of discussions with people in my department, I proposed to our VP that we needed a manager who:
- would own the release process
- would drive initiatives to make the department better that didn't have an obvious owner
- would provide a point of contact for other departments, and more importantly act as an advocate for them in development
Said VP agreed, so my competent team lead is being promoted to manager to replace me, and I'm sliding sideways to report directly to the VP. I leave my current team of 16 (plus two confirmed hires for next year and hopefully one more we're working to get hired) for the new manager. I will pick up two new reports, both project managers from other teams who work on the release to some extent, and the next big adventure begins. More accurately, the adventure has already begun because I've been working on this stuff for almost 18 months, but now it is official. The transition period has started, and the new role officially kicks off November 9.
This is going to be a lot of work with a high impact on the department. Of course, a lot of it is going to the somewhat tedious work of getting people to follow up on their commitments, but there's plenty of room for proposing and implementing new ideas. I can see this easily lasting the next couple of years.
And before you ask, my title (Manager, Development) stays the same and so does my salary. That's fine; the title is less important than the work done. Many headaches are caused by the few people who don't seem to get that.
Shortly thereafter I took over a huge cross-departmental effort with reasonable success. That effort continues to this day, and has alleviated much of the ennui I documented, and led to me starting a lot of other initiatives to improve the department, in particular the release process for our software. Most of these initiatives were the sort of long complicated multi-step process that we'd been particularly bad at as a company, but it turned out that I was actually pretty effective at shepherding those through to completion. I actually started spending most of my time on that sort of work instead of what I was officially supposed to be doing, which worked out fine because I have three very competent team leads and many more competent team members who could take things and run with them.
Since I wasn't really spending much time on my official job, and one of my team leads was more than ready to fill my role, I needed to find other position. After some surprisingly helpful career counseling from HR and a lot of discussions with people in my department, I proposed to our VP that we needed a manager who:
- would own the release process
- would drive initiatives to make the department better that didn't have an obvious owner
- would provide a point of contact for other departments, and more importantly act as an advocate for them in development
Said VP agreed, so my competent team lead is being promoted to manager to replace me, and I'm sliding sideways to report directly to the VP. I leave my current team of 16 (plus two confirmed hires for next year and hopefully one more we're working to get hired) for the new manager. I will pick up two new reports, both project managers from other teams who work on the release to some extent, and the next big adventure begins. More accurately, the adventure has already begun because I've been working on this stuff for almost 18 months, but now it is official. The transition period has started, and the new role officially kicks off November 9.
This is going to be a lot of work with a high impact on the department. Of course, a lot of it is going to the somewhat tedious work of getting people to follow up on their commitments, but there's plenty of room for proposing and implementing new ideas. I can see this easily lasting the next couple of years.
And before you ask, my title (Manager, Development) stays the same and so does my salary. That's fine; the title is less important than the work done. Many headaches are caused by the few people who don't seem to get that.