Risk analysis in IT Management nowadays is spectacularly bad.
If you become dependent on a 3rd supplier then their survival as a company is now a risk for you. It doesn’t matter how good the reliability you have contracted with them - if they go under whatever penalities in the contract for failing to deliver said reliability will never be paid.
You might even be at risk of them simply chosing to close that division - small company signing a service supply contract with a big company: good luck getting a contract where the parent company (rather than whatever paper company they spun up for that business area) actually has to pay you stiff penalties if they fuck you over.
As soon as mission critical anything is outside your company, a lot of otherwise irrelevant things become operational risks for your company.
This is why you don’t put your mission critical anything on an external Cloud supplier.
You know, stuff like the only copy of 70 years of TV history that’s actually just 50TB and would’ve fit a bunch of Hard Disks or Backup tapes.
Yeah I did risk analysis for 9 years and the job gradually devolved in useless box check-in with people checking nothing, until all of us were laid off and replaced by an AI and a few people in India checking the output. It’s all for show.
This is something I kept pointing out to management at my last company, but they were always so hellbent on putting everything in the cloud. Then construction across the street cut some fiber or something going to our building. When I told management that we had no Internet and I was sending everyone home, they lost their shit. I mollified them a bit by pointing out that at least some people would be able to work from home. I then waited until the meeting the next morning to point out that only 1 QA/support person and 1 dev had laptops (because of course management didn’t see any reason to spend the extra money for laptops over desktops). It was also nice to be able to make the CEO and VP to drive all the way home and back to get their wireless data pucks they used as their personal Internet connections.
My overwhelming joy at all the petty little ways I was able to rub their bad decisions in their faces was a big part of what made me actually start hunting for a new job rather than just thinking about it.
Yeah, even having learned to explain this shit in the IT Consultancy language of “supply contracts” and “mission critical”, it’s still not guaranteed that I’ll convince a manager to avoid or at least account for the higher exposure to outside risks when subcontracting certain things.
Nowadays, with 3 decades of experience in the Industry, I honestly think that the majority of managers, no matter how high in a company, are either incompetent as fuck or simply manage with as priority maximizing their next bonus in the full knowledge that they’re leaving traps for the next one to solve and if they do blow up during their own time, they’ll still personally end up better off by going for bonus-today-problem-tomorrow than refraining from doing so.
The Peter Principle states that a manager will get promoted to his level of incompetency, then get stuck there. As time goes on, more and more managers reach their level of incompetency, until the entire management level is populated by people who are bad at their jobs.
Say a guy is a great salesman, the best in the company, beats all his targets. He’s just great at it, and all his customers love him. So he gets promoted to sales manager, with a nice office, and a big raise.
But just because he’s a talented salesman, doesn’t mean he knows how to manage sales people. Also, the guy who replaced him isn’t pulling in near the revenue, so the department he’s managing is now WORSE than before he took over. He becomes just another mediocre manager, in over his head, and he never gets another promotion again.
Or maybe he moves up a few more levels, but eventually he hits the point that he can’t do well, and that’s where he remains, being mediocre. After a while, ALL the managers are people who were good at their old jobs, but mediocre at this one, and here they stay, until they are swept out in their 50s.
As you mentioned, people promoted all the way up to the first position they are truly incompetent at, i.e. the Peter Principle
Nepotism and cronyism - people are getting the jobs because who they know (i.e. “the old boys network”) or who their family are, not competence.
People get the job because they’re good at personal image management and social networking - they mingle with the right people and project the right impression with things like speaking in a firm confident manner about things they know nothing about - which are fine skills to have and even applicable to some of the job of management (at the mid and above management levels), just not enough for the rest of the job of management, and that part missing is in most management positions the biggest chunk (and includes the stuff for recognition of risks and accounting for them).
Upper level managers hire people like themselves to work under them. This partly overlaps with number 2 but goes further. When said upper level management is incompetent because they got in due to one or more of the other 3 problems, they hire people the same profile as themselves even if not due to those reasons directly (a simple example: managers who look and behave posh because they attended a posh private school will tend to hire managers who look the same hence are likely to have attended such schools themselves - this isn’t directly cronyism but ends up producing a similar effect as they’re selecting people from their social domain even if they don’t know them personally)
I would say that nowadays in management the first one is a pretty small fraction of it (except maybe in the less prestigious and less paid low level management positions) because people are rarely “promoted from the ground floor” nowadays and hiring for more prestigious positions is very heavy on the impression people project, so most of the problem are numbers 2 and 3 plus a bit of number 4.
Number 4 is especially pernicious because it means that once an institution is managed at the top level by people who do not recognize the importance of certain skills in management (like caring about and understanding risk analysis) it tends to mainly hire people who are the same for other management positions and even for replacements for the top job - people who don’t think a certain skill or mindset is important for the job are not going to have as a hiring criteria that candidates have such skill or mindset.
Risk analysis in IT Management nowadays is spectacularly bad.
If you become dependent on a 3rd supplier then their survival as a company is now a risk for you. It doesn’t matter how good the reliability you have contracted with them - if they go under whatever penalities in the contract for failing to deliver said reliability will never be paid.
You might even be at risk of them simply chosing to close that division - small company signing a service supply contract with a big company: good luck getting a contract where the parent company (rather than whatever paper company they spun up for that business area) actually has to pay you stiff penalties if they fuck you over.
As soon as mission critical anything is outside your company, a lot of otherwise irrelevant things become operational risks for your company.
This is why you don’t put your mission critical anything on an external Cloud supplier.
You know, stuff like the only copy of 70 years of TV history that’s actually just 50TB and would’ve fit a bunch of Hard Disks or Backup tapes.
Yeah I did risk analysis for 9 years and the job gradually devolved in useless box check-in with people checking nothing, until all of us were laid off and replaced by an AI and a few people in India checking the output. It’s all for show.
This is something I kept pointing out to management at my last company, but they were always so hellbent on putting everything in the cloud. Then construction across the street cut some fiber or something going to our building. When I told management that we had no Internet and I was sending everyone home, they lost their shit. I mollified them a bit by pointing out that at least some people would be able to work from home. I then waited until the meeting the next morning to point out that only 1 QA/support person and 1 dev had laptops (because of course management didn’t see any reason to spend the extra money for laptops over desktops). It was also nice to be able to make the CEO and VP to drive all the way home and back to get their wireless data pucks they used as their personal Internet connections.
My overwhelming joy at all the petty little ways I was able to rub their bad decisions in their faces was a big part of what made me actually start hunting for a new job rather than just thinking about it.
Yeah, even having learned to explain this shit in the IT Consultancy language of “supply contracts” and “mission critical”, it’s still not guaranteed that I’ll convince a manager to avoid or at least account for the higher exposure to outside risks when subcontracting certain things.
Nowadays, with 3 decades of experience in the Industry, I honestly think that the majority of managers, no matter how high in a company, are either incompetent as fuck or simply manage with as priority maximizing their next bonus in the full knowledge that they’re leaving traps for the next one to solve and if they do blow up during their own time, they’ll still personally end up better off by going for bonus-today-problem-tomorrow than refraining from doing so.
The Peter Principle states that a manager will get promoted to his level of incompetency, then get stuck there. As time goes on, more and more managers reach their level of incompetency, until the entire management level is populated by people who are bad at their jobs.
Say a guy is a great salesman, the best in the company, beats all his targets. He’s just great at it, and all his customers love him. So he gets promoted to sales manager, with a nice office, and a big raise.
But just because he’s a talented salesman, doesn’t mean he knows how to manage sales people. Also, the guy who replaced him isn’t pulling in near the revenue, so the department he’s managing is now WORSE than before he took over. He becomes just another mediocre manager, in over his head, and he never gets another promotion again.
Or maybe he moves up a few more levels, but eventually he hits the point that he can’t do well, and that’s where he remains, being mediocre. After a while, ALL the managers are people who were good at their old jobs, but mediocre at this one, and here they stay, until they are swept out in their 50s.
I think that there are roughly 4 causes:
I would say that nowadays in management the first one is a pretty small fraction of it (except maybe in the less prestigious and less paid low level management positions) because people are rarely “promoted from the ground floor” nowadays and hiring for more prestigious positions is very heavy on the impression people project, so most of the problem are numbers 2 and 3 plus a bit of number 4.
Number 4 is especially pernicious because it means that once an institution is managed at the top level by people who do not recognize the importance of certain skills in management (like caring about and understanding risk analysis) it tends to mainly hire people who are the same for other management positions and even for replacements for the top job - people who don’t think a certain skill or mindset is important for the job are not going to have as a hiring criteria that candidates have such skill or mindset.