The Next New Role at Work
May 20th was my 17th anniversary of the start of my job, and yes, I feel old at work regularly now that we have high school interns who are younger than my career. More interestingly, I also changed roles on the same day.
A lot has changed in the 3.5 years since I was put in charge of release management. My team effectively became project management for Development, which then merged with Quality Assurance to become R&D. We also acquired a bunch of other companies who were merged in and decided to massively overhaul how we released the various software platforms we write. At one point we had a departmental reorg which had our group move into the newly formed R&D Operations group and 4 of my 5 people were promoted to other roles or left the company, which forced me to hire three brand new people and effectively start over.
It became clear that we needed a dedicated Release Management team that did nothing else but that, which I proposed last year. At the same time, we also identified a need for unified project management to pull together R&D and our new Product Management group. Perhaps most importantly, I grew tired of repeating the same tactical things over and over again around the release.
As such, one of my new people was promoted to manager of the newly formed Release Management team, which was put inside the newly formed Office of Enterprise Project Management. All of my team members moved over to one area of the other. I really wasn't interested in any of these roles. Instead I remain in R&D Operations as a Corporate Strategy Manager, which essentially means I keep working on huge complicated department wide projects, or at least on figuring out strategic items and handing them off to people to implement them. I'm not 100% sure how this will work as we've never had one in R&D before, so I'll be making it up as I go along for the third time role change in a row.
This is more of a lateral move than the prior roles. I get a small bump in salary, mostly to cover the loss of my management bonus. I don't have direct reports anymore, which doesn't bother me although having reports was never the part of my job I disliked. And if it doesn't work out, I have options. In that event, I may even consider going back to a writing code. I'm far enough away from coding and enough new people have come on that my technical credibility is starting to recede.
A lot has changed in the 3.5 years since I was put in charge of release management. My team effectively became project management for Development, which then merged with Quality Assurance to become R&D. We also acquired a bunch of other companies who were merged in and decided to massively overhaul how we released the various software platforms we write. At one point we had a departmental reorg which had our group move into the newly formed R&D Operations group and 4 of my 5 people were promoted to other roles or left the company, which forced me to hire three brand new people and effectively start over.
It became clear that we needed a dedicated Release Management team that did nothing else but that, which I proposed last year. At the same time, we also identified a need for unified project management to pull together R&D and our new Product Management group. Perhaps most importantly, I grew tired of repeating the same tactical things over and over again around the release.
As such, one of my new people was promoted to manager of the newly formed Release Management team, which was put inside the newly formed Office of Enterprise Project Management. All of my team members moved over to one area of the other. I really wasn't interested in any of these roles. Instead I remain in R&D Operations as a Corporate Strategy Manager, which essentially means I keep working on huge complicated department wide projects, or at least on figuring out strategic items and handing them off to people to implement them. I'm not 100% sure how this will work as we've never had one in R&D before, so I'll be making it up as I go along for the third time role change in a row.
This is more of a lateral move than the prior roles. I get a small bump in salary, mostly to cover the loss of my management bonus. I don't have direct reports anymore, which doesn't bother me although having reports was never the part of my job I disliked. And if it doesn't work out, I have options. In that event, I may even consider going back to a writing code. I'm far enough away from coding and enough new people have come on that my technical credibility is starting to recede.