The Manual Operational Importance Fallacy

A trend I have noticed among some operational / Tier 2 / 3 support personnel is the lack of willingness to take on new projects and learn new things. They want to focus merely on keeping everything running. This concept of "bailing water out of the sinking boat" actually becomes their job. Opportunities come up which might allow them to learn new skills or advance, yet they cling to this notion of saving the company and keeping it running as noble and valuable work.

Don't get trapped in this mentality, see it for what it is, and make sure to keep advancing your career. In the process you will have more fun with your job.

Fallacy Traps

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Watch for these signs and make sure to consult those who you see going this direction. These ideals lure people into a false sense of job security thinking this makes them more valuable, when it can actually be the opposite.

• "If I didn't watch this all day, it would all come apart."

• "Its necessary to check this daily to ensure this process stays functional."

• "I was told I have to do this X times a day or we will have more problems."

• "I learned to watch out for this every week to avoid this one error we keep seeing."

• "This system stops working when I don't perform this action every couple hours."

Root Cause: the Harsh Truth

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The bottom line is they are not helping out anyone by doing these tasks. Something. A good engineer is a lazy engineer. Why would you want to sign up for more work and not just fix it? Lets try and get to the bottom of the reasoning and motivation for employees saying these things.

• Fear of systems or processes they don't understand.

• Wanting to settle down into a job where they do the same thing every day.

• Trying to appear busy / needed.

• Not wanting to learn new skills / technologies.

Digging Out of the Fallacy

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Capture and catalog when you hear people doing these things. Turn any time people these repetitive issues into a task they must document. Report on these tasks and how long its taking people to let you see where time is being spent. Show people the amount of time they are spending on these tasks. Guide them into understanding how they might be able to solve these problems in a more permanent manner. Get them training if they need more knowledge on how to fix.

You can also be proactive: work with product managers to see where these inefficiencies are and how they might productize a solution. Ensure your operations team is a constantly evolving culture of problems arising and being solved. Don't hold onto any of them, these manual workarounds should be like a revolving door: some may sneak in, but soon they will be fixed and out the door.