Thank you for the positive response, and for not automatically assuming I’m some corporate asshole drone 🤣 . I have leadership support from all teams involved.

I don’t actually want to change what they do; they have the thing working great. I just want to make sure they are getting the necessary tickets with the correct information they need, in the way that works best for them. Understanding their process is just ancillary to this effort, because I like to understand all the moving parts. I do also need to make sure the information is getting to the necessary teams in the next steps after their part of the process, with the correct information, and if there are any hiccups.

Good point. I’ve saved all my vitriol for our incompetent Product Team though 😜

Sorry, meant Azure

This is gold. Are you looking for a job?

Yeah, I hadn’t even mentioned it to them. Also they are in Bosnia, and almost all of us work remote, so it’s not like I get to see them around the office. They are not in any of the engineering teams I oversee, and I’m relatively new to this role. I’m very excited to get their take on this though; it’s a great idea.

Ok, so I AM asking the engineers that. But we need to be angle to track the implementations for each client, and that is why we are using JIRA. I’m very open to alternative ideas, but one of the problems is that teams involved are using salesforce, JIRA, and Azure, and this is causing a serious dearth of communication, as well as there being no way for anyone to get a bird’s eye view of where implementations currently stand. Frankly I have a lot more autonomy and control over this thing than anyone in this thread seems to be used to, so if people have better process ideas, I am all ears.

This had not even occurred to me. Now On my to do list for Monday.

Fair enough. But I actually do want to know that stuff, and it’s not over my head.

This is…very interesting

You’re spot on. Fortunately the board has seen the light, and made some big changes today, which sound like they are going to flow downhill.

This is a very long story, from my previous role, but both of those engineers have been promoted, and we are good friends.

I think you and I might have some things in common. I am also captain of team Neurodivergent, and we are my favorite kinds of people.

Thank you!!! In fact I have been emphasizing that I need to know the technicals, and that they should not worry about getting too detailed, because I need a very thorough understanding so I can best come up with a process for how they do file ingestion (which mostly is up to them) but then also how the information gets to them, and how they output the data, in the best, most thoroughly documented (without being uselessly pedantic) way possible. Which is pretty much going to be getting everything into JIRA, and eliminating all the uselessly disparate systems that people are trying to stitch together currently. I need to make sure all the teams along the road of this process are communicating with each other, and at are at least having a basic understanding of the whys behind what is required of the process. And of course that it is efficient and fast and definitely not cumbersome.

I’m at the stage of “I want to know how your process has worked up until now, and how you would like it to work, in a perfect world.” Which did seem to garner a positive response.

Yeah, text communications are constantly problematic for these reasons. I was being 100% serious.

This is an area my company has historically sucked at. Hard. I aim to fix that, and in fact that is the reason my team was created.

I think a lot of it is trust/comfort, and I am definitely making progress in that regard, and the advice here has been fantastic. Which I suspected it would be. My strategy is that we need to work together to solve issues, like if they were to “tell me the wrong thing.” It could certainly gum up the works if I am basing a part of a new process on bad info, but honestly I have no desire to gotcha anyone, and I think that would be completely unproductive at this stage of the game. They have this file ingestion “engine” running pretty darn well, and now we need to tweak, and improve, and gameplan for the upcoming year.

This is not at all what is happening here, but your sentiments are certainly valid. This is about process creation and improvement.

This is exactly the vibe I have been getting. And I have really been trying to reassure them that I am in no way looking to “punish” anyone for any mistakes. If anything, I want to hear about mistakes, and any solutions that were thought up, as a guide to how we can improve the process going forward, to make their jobs easier, as well as everyone’s. It’s all super positive, and none of this will ever “come back to bite them.” But without finding out their challenges, it makes it very difficult to try an anticipate what issues we may run into as we build these processes, and further on down the line.