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Web Management Difficulties

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by college_webguy

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I would like any advice or suggestions on how to rectify an internal management problem that constantly demoralizes and undermines my college Web team.

My college formed a small advisory group of departmental directors to put together a Web leadership team, which consists of four managers from various departments. The four managers are made up of a network manager (Web developer leader), a help desk / trainer / designer (Web operations manager and Web design leader), a public relations member (content manager and news leader), and a project and personell manager. Under these four are design, development, and news leads who oversee a small group of designers, developers, and reporters. The design lead reports to the Web operations manager and Web design leader, the development lead reports to the Web development leader, and the news lead reports to the news leader.

The problem that consistently arises is that the public relations member constantly communicates with a designer and developer without delegating his requests to either the lead designer, the Web operations manager and design leader, or the leadership team. In other words, the public relations leadership member constantly disregards the rest of the team and does an end-run-around. The team has confronted the member several times, but the problem keeps resurfacing. The public relations leadership member also wants the job descriptions and duties reworked or reworded on what seems like a monthly basis. The advisory group has done nothing more than give us a pep talk that the college needs our work. We plan on meeting as a whole and discussing these issues at length with everyone in the future, which hopefully will help resolve some of them. But I fear it will not.

My request is this: How can we as a team overcome this debilitating issue if we cannot do anything about it and our supervisors will not? Do we resort to ignoring the misguided requests of the public relations manager with a firm warning that it is out-of-line? We have tried compromising so many times I think that route has been...well...compromised. What rhetorical approaches would you suggest to use at the bigger meeting when reviewing the problems in front of the member who caused them?

Your experience and help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

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by oldefar

You have a management issue that is outside of your ability to control. Instead, you are faced with a need to influence.

A couple of key points to remember. First are the five currencies of business - time, money, knowledge, security, and prestige. We all negotiate to get an aggregate positive result in these currencies, and the trick is to insure everyone ends up with an overall gain in their total. The rogue member is probably acting to improve his time or prestige currency. Understand which it is, and work at alternative ways of improving it or ways of adding to his other currencies so he will still have a positive result while working within the team process.

At the same time look at where your team's morale is being impacted. Is this person's actions costing you in time, money, knowledge, security, or prestige? Knowing yourself will help guide what you want to have a positive income from team membership. As example - posters at TR lose time. There is no gain in money in most situations. Security may be risked by participating. However, there is a positive flow of knowledge and prestige by participating that keeps us at it.

Now the architectural approach. This helps keep everyone on track. Business objectives drive business requirements. Business requirements drive technical objectives. Technical objectives drive technical requirements. Technical requirement define solutions. Map this out like an organizational chart, and make sure each level has a direct link to the one above. Show the interdependencies across each level. Illustrate how proper support of specific business requirements (content) impacts design and technical management. Reach a consensus on the diagram at the top level and get buy-in as to who has responsibility at each level. Now when a change is made, bounce it off this diagram. You can influence better by insuring the links are in place rather than challenging the change directly.

Good luck.

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