Not performing your job to the best of your ability can be one of the worst feelings in the world. But fear not, it’s not always your fault (eh, sometimes it is). Many times that I don’t complete things the right was is because I’m strapped for time. The problem that I come across can’t wait till tomorrow or the next day to be fixed, it has to be done now or it might hurt the business. So I bite my lip and fix the immediate problem and I never look back again.
One great example of this is improving network perimeter security. I need to lock down what people can acess from the inside of our network to the internet. I could close off all access except for port 80 and 443 but that might break a finance application or an engineer’s connection to one of our customers. This would be a big no-no in the IT world. So when I get that call that something broke, I hop onto the firewall and add the rule that’s necessary to fix the immediate problem but I don’t figure out where the traffic is going or if there is a better way of doing this. This is a big problem because I didn’t plan out what my fix was.
Many people don’t realize the amount of time that it takes to plan out a project properly in any area. It’s not just a quick slap on fix — a plan needs to be layed out, decisions have to be made and re-made and testing has to be done to make sure that whatever is setup will not negatively affect the business any more than is necessary.
The issue at hand (no planning or testing) is not any one person’s fault in a company. There are always outside circumstances that cause things to be pushed through at a lightning speed because the CEO or the CIO need it today or the marketing department needed it yesterday but that doesn’t excuse proper planning or testing. I’m a firm believer in fixing a problem as soon as possible in order to get things running again but one thing that we in IT forget to do is to go back and take a look at the problem when time isn’t a concern. Without doing this second part of the process it will almost always take more time and money to fix the issue later.
I hope people (including myself) start thinking about the future problems that they leave behind when they run to fix an issue and put a band-aid on instead of actually fixing the underlying problem at hand. In the short run it might be time consuming and a pain to take a step back and actually focus but you’ll definitely save yourself a world of headaches if you make sure to go back later and actually correct the problem.
