Relax...its ok...

Sometimes its good to sit back, listen, nod and hear what is being said before speaking.   Actually, that is almost always the best idea.

Case in point:

I am the team lead here (small team of 3...SQL, Windows and storage admins...we overlap.).

I cam back from lunch yesterday and one of my guys very passionately launched into "We need to have a meeting!", "The developers want too many deployments!", "We need change management!", etc.

All of his points were true.  This is a small team with very few procedures and practises, and our job is to get a handle on this.   We are also at the end of the development process for v1.0 of an internal application...which is being demonstrated today.   Not the best time to suddenly change things.

So I listened while he made his case, agreed with most of what he said and asked some questions when he was done:

1.  What problem are you trying to solve by forcing change windows today that don't exist?

2.  How many "deployments" are we being asked to do each day?  (A deployment here could simply be ALTERing a stored proc, and the target is a Pre-Production database)

3. Should we be focusing on the other issues here we have already identified?  Where does this rank in the list? (Backups, security, perf, etc. all rank higher and are more actionable)

What it boiled down to is that we don't really have a problem...he just got hit with three requests in a short time frame, due to the upcoming demo to the executive staff.

We get maybe 2 requests a day from the Devs, and have 3 people capable of deploying them.  At this time, on this project...all a forced window will do is alienate 10 of the 15 team members.   Yes, it is a good idea, but lets phase it in for better acceptance, when the team is not under the gun.  Production release is only a month away...

Sometimes its best to relax, look at the bigger picture and make the best decision for the team.

Imma buy this guy lunch, with fries :)

Kevin3NF