Thriving in the 21st century workplace

I recently got a message from a colleague and friend who was embarking on a bit of a career adventure, going from a strictly technical role to one where some formal management was going to be required.  After (tongue-in-cheek) offering my condolences, I shared the story of the first real lesson I remember learning as a manager.

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I didn’t want to write a 9/11 post, to try and put such a huge event in the context of my tiny corporate blog.

But I had a conversation with some colleagues and family over the weekend, and I thought it would be useful to record one piece of information about that day.

I remember many things about that day, sitting here at EMC in Hopkinton.   But one thing that stuck with me over the years is that my manager at the time gave me a hard time about leaving at mid-day to be with my wife, who had been sent home from her work in a high-rise building (if you remember, many high-rise buildings were closed and their employees sent home) and really didn’t feel comfortable being alone.

I’m sure we were working on something really important that day. I’m sure that manager did what they felt was best for the corporation on that day.

I have no idea what I was working on that day.  But I do remember exactly how that interaction felt.  And I remember how absurd that feeling is, in the context of the world-changing events that took place on that day.

It’s a lesson as a manager I carry forward.  I write this not to call out my previous manager but to remind all of us as managers that the world is bigger than our deadlines.

Releasing a product is one of the hardest jobs we have, as creators of software.  Developing a product is a potentially never-ending process; there are always new features to be added, bugs to be fixed, and test configurations to validate against.  A release date pulls the team together, an often-moving deadline to strive against as an organization.  Everybody pulls out all the stops, developers and testers work through nights and weekends, technical writers come out of the woodwork to keep documentation updated, and the leadership team meets daily to ask the question: “Is it done yet?”

The question, of course, is really “is it done enough yet?”.

We finally shipped ProSphere 1.0 at the close of July.  I am not surprising anyone when I say that wasn’t the first release date we had in mind, nor am I surprising anyone when I said we shipped with a backlog of items we wished had made it into 1.0.  But at some point you need to ship it and move on.

Today I have a slightly different team; a few people have changed responsibilities to allow the teams to better meet the needs of our next release.  And while I work to integrate that new team together, I also stew over a laundry list of requirements and enhancements to our product for the next release.  Resolving priority conflicts, providing gross estimates, learning new areas of the product, and making sure nothing slips through the cracks — it’s a busy time.

It’s a totally different kind of busy than when trying to release a product — but it’s just as important.  The context shift is jarring, but the quality of the work done today will impact our working lives for the coming months, and have a direct impact on the satisfaction of our customers with the next version of this product.

This is, of course, the job we all signed up for.  It’s an exciting time.

In 1996, I joined the CLARiiON team to work on a new Storage Resource Management product. It was a management software leap to go along with the leap forward from SCSI to Fibre Channel. We looked at everything that was “wrong” about the existing solutions, took into account new requirements based on the scalability of the new hardware, updated our products to use the leading edge technologies, and created something entirely new – Navisphere. It was a huge splash for CLARiiON, and helped define everything I think of as successful in a software project.

Fifteen years later, I’m writing about a new big splash for EMC in the SRM space – ProSphere 1.0. I’ll stop you right here and tell you that you need to go read Chuck’s post on the product. I can’t out-do his deep-dive into the industry angles and why it’s such a big deal, so I won’t even try.

What I will tell you is why working on this product was so different from any other product I’ve touched at EMC, and why I’m so proud to be able to announce it here. Just like fifteen years ago, it was a chance to take a look at everything “wrong” while also still looking in new directions at the same time the industry is making another scale leap with Cloud environments. This has been some of the hardest work I’ve done here at EMC. But seeing it get out the door is making it all worth it.

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As I started this blog, I set up some mental rules.

One of them was something I learned from Steve Todd, way back in the day — always excel at your day job before you do anything else at work.  Doing a great job in your primary responsibilities is what gives you the freedom to explore secondary responsibilities.

I’ve been eyeball-deep in work on EMC’s next offering for Storage Resource Management (what you may have heard referred to as “SRM7″).  Never mind my days, it’s consumed my nights as well!  So I’ve let this blog get a bit rusty.

There are some other rules I’ve set for myself, and it’s cool to see that the “social” folks at EMC have codified some of those rules into a little video that people here actually get training credit for watching.  It’s short and sweet, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Early in my career as a manager, I attended a discussion where the question was raised: are we people managers or business managers?  Is it more important to be good with people, or to know the business side of your product?  Over time I have realized it’s much more than just those two – and I’ve begun calling them the axes of concern.

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Check out Len’s post for more info — EMC is looking to hire an overall brand manager for their social presence.   Considering how huge EMC is, how organically our social presence has grown, and how crazy the social space can get, I can’t wait to see how it will go with a dedicated person trying to watch over it all.

Good luck to any applicants!

EMCWorld 2011 is right around the corner!

I don’t know yet if I’ll be there, but I can tell you what will be there — a handful of sessions describing the new storage resource product that’s been occupying all my time of late.  There’s even a hands-on!

I can’t yet tell you the product’s marketing name (pesky lawyers), but we’ve been calling it “SRM 7″ internally for a while now, and we’re wrapping up the first round of beta sites and pushing full speed ahead for a coming general availability release.

If you’re a ControlCenter customer and want to see what’s coming soon, make sure to sign up for any/all of the “Beyond ControlCenter” sessions listed in the EMC World course catalog.  Tell them Dave sent you .

If you’re in software, you’ve heard of iterative development.  Simplified, its intent is to rapidly create a working piece of software and then continue on small cycles of improvement on that software, until the stakeholders want it released.

This isn’t a post about software development, though.  Instead, I’m sharing how iterative development has changed my approach to performance reviews.

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My first day at work, according to the EMC HR department, was January 7, 1996.  Fifteen years ago today.  I think the date is wrong, since that day is a Sunday.  But the week is certainly right.

I remember the day very well … because it was my first day of “real work,” and it was a snow day.

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