• Steve, Honestly thank you for this. Very good piece.

    I remember two disasters in the IT field over the years. One year back in the 70's the mainframe computer room caught fire and the emergency shutdown happened. This was a complete shutdown with a hard down and Halon filling the room. Two people were almost caught in the room when the emergency glass door closed to smother the fire. In the weeks that followed there were meetings, planning, and more meetings to replan and restart the center. Vendors were there 24x7 and people worked hard just to get the system back online. When management types would mouth off and start complaining they were taken into more meeting to work it out behind closed doors and the technicians were not there. The techs were insolated from the politics and screaming while they worked the problem and got the site operational as soon as they could. That worked.

    The second disaster we when due to a single compromise in the engineering of the building. One water pipe entered or crossed the area where the main computer wiring traversed the building. In essence there was an unlimited supply of water traveling across the mainline channel which was lined with cement. Needless to say one day that water line broke and the water traveled down the channel directly back into the computer and it dumped out in the ceiling just above the racks of servers. Vendors and techs were on site within two hours and the entire site was back and operational in a few days. But again it was a very controlled project with those who had questions not given access to the techs.

    In these cases cool heads and calm words bring out the desired result. Yelling and the blaming since it is counter productive needs to be removed from the area where productivity needs to optimized. This is a good case where if there is someone who really needs to yell should be instructed to go yell at the wall. 🙂

    M.

    Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!