I’ve heard it a gazillion times and never really thought about it. It’s really hard to let go 0_o
Let’s recap a little. I was hired to take over a component of middle technical complexity but with a very high theoretical background and a crazy visibility.
By “middle technical complexity” I mean that the comp’ is “just” performing conversions from a format to another and raising alarms if something is not as expected.
By “very high theoretical background” I mean that both input and output are coded into a standard (DICOM) that is barely as sexy as a phone book.
And by “crazy visibility” I mean that if the output is always the same, the input varies and furthermore comes from a bunch of different companies… thus requires some interface work with the rest of the world.
It means for me: get into big boots. Understand a totally new world and deal with the concurence in defining our interfaces. Answer on the fly to very complex conceptual questions and drive the discussions on both side as every interface project does.
Anyhow. As I said I was hired for all this and I stive to get better at it everyday. Which until now meant “put my little fingers everywhere, try to be there to scrap some knowledge and force the decisions to go by me so that I get what’s going on”.
But now that I have a working team, some guys on which I count and who can count on me… I must let go. I must let them chose their path, maybe go in the wall a couple times and learn from there but by all means learn to take decisions as a team not having me as a bottle neck and reach a higher velocity than what we could achieve with me at the reins.
But that means no more warm central place for me, no more passive learning, no more passive controlling that everything runs smoothly… *yeiykes*!
This post is naturally sponsored by the newbie-managers-on-vacation anonymous group >_<
