Luke's general blog

Over the years I've had bosses that have had varying degrees of technical skills. I've tried to see how the different skills did or didn't improve their management ability.

Today I've been working on compiling a capacity report that included some performance data. I caught on to vagrancy in the data that caused me to reflect on how to fix it and realize the scope of the fix. I decided to attribute it to a larger effort I had planned to add some additional indicators on the system I used to feed me the data to compile the report.

And then it hit me: this was why a previous leader had been so insistent that the tools side be updated before they got the data. They didn't have the time to actually evaluate the vagrancies; they just wanted to make a business declaration on the data. They did see the awesome power of those kind of declarations, and they preferred to have that power to themselves versus sharing it with an analyst. This wasn't totally true -- they did use a certain type of analyst, but one at a soft skill rather than hard skill level. There are many other reasons why tool set updates need to be at a high priority, but I think it filled in a gap for me why this was so important.