What Should The New Broom Actually Do?

What’s your response when you’re handed stuff that somebody else did? Specifically, when you’re the New Person, brought in to clear up the mess — real or perceived! — that the Previous Administration created?

Mind you, let’s get the “Everything Is Irretrievably F**ked Up” scenario out of the way. Oh yes, these situations do exist, but then again, unless you’re The Wolf (Pulp Fiction. Movie. 1994. Now I feel Old) this doesn’t apply to you.

Odds are that you’ve been brought in to deal with a “mess”, (Hint: Not An Actual Mess). For any number of reasons, the existing system/structure/processes just didn’t cut it any more, and the Powers That Be decided that a change was necessary. And you’re that change.

So fine. 
You’re the change. 
And the million dollar question is — “What do you do?”

Step 1 : Blame The Previous Administration

This is the single most common pattern out there (admit it, you’ve probably done this yourself!). And it’s an easy one too — after all, there is certainly any amount of broken stuff around, or stuff that doesn’t quite work perfectly, or tech debt, or whatever. And the easiest thing to do is to say that it’s because of incompetence.

Is it really incompetence tho? If you think it is, you'd probably be wrong. Wildly, terribly wrong at that.

Why? Because you're ignoring context!!!

Face it — nobody sits around saying “Yes, I want tech-debt! I need tech-debt! I’m going to deliberately design the system poorly!”, y’know? That system that you inherited that only does about 50% of the work, leaving the other 50% to be done manually with Google-sheets? Odds are that it was a conscious decision to farm off half the work to humans, to get stuff in production faster. And then, instead of cleaning that up, it was more important to get something else in production, and so on, and so forth.

Basically, context matters. Then again, it’s probably not the reason you’re saying “incompetence”. The reality is that, when you joined, and people give you their list of 87 things that need to be fixed, the last thing that they want to hear from you is stuff like “context matters” and “well, does it *really* matter that we’re google-sheeting that part, ‘cos it’s still way easier than coding it up” and so on. If anything, their response will be something like “WAT. That’s exactly what the previous person said, and that’s why we fired them! We cleared made a mistake in hiring you!”

Ergo, the obvious thing to do is to blame the previous administration. And that’s ok. Go for it, and with my blessings. It’ll give you breathing room.

Step 2 : Make Some Changes

So yeah, you blamed the previous administration. And that got you some breathing room. What do you do with the breathing room? Well, you could go around figuring out what the real systemic (and/or endemic) issues are, and go about resolving them, all of which, unfortunately, does take time 🤬. And the problem there is that, if left to itself, you’re going to get folks saying “Hmmm, did we make the wrong choice with this person. Because nothing seems to be happening?!?”.
The way around that is to get a couple of quick cosmetic things out the door. Of course, all the while, blaming the previous administration. Because you want to make it very clear that, unlike the incompetence of yore, you have everything under control see? and you can get stuff delivered, see?

And, frankly, that’s fine. I mean, it’s not exactly cricket, but hey, it buys you the time to get the important work done.

Step 3 : (Don’t) Drink the Kool-Aid

And this is where so much tends to go so disastrously wrong.
The question is — what is that “important work that needs to get done”?

Some of you (oh yes. you!) fall into the trap of convincing yourself that everything is actually broken, and that everything needs to be replaced (!!!).
The thing is — fork-lift upgrades pretty much never work! The time, energy, and effort you are spending on the fork-lift upgrade is so much better spent in actually improving the existing setup, and delivering actual value to customers. However, if you drink the kool-aid, you’ll end up convincing yourself that oh, yes, you’re going to rebuild the entire system from scratch and that’ll, eventually, actually, deliver tons more value to customers!

This is a particularly common trend for folks from EnterpriseWorld where there is always time — and money — to do stuff! The thing is, in StartupLand, the key is to Deliver. If you deliver, you live on to fight another day. If you don’t, well, no customers, no company. What’s worse, you’re always at the mercy of changing market conditions, investor sentiment, (better-funded) competitors, fickle consumers, and quite possibly the phase of the moon.

The bottom line — resist the urge! Complain all you want about the way things are setup, but do not (!!!) fall into the trap of replacing the systems! Odds are, given the timeframes involved, you’ll run into at least some — if not all! — of the following

1. Existing employees that flee. Who will mange the existing system now? Especially given that the new system is probably far from ready?
2. Poisoned wells. After all, why would new folks join the company to deal with the existing systems, given that you’re clearly deprecating these systems?
3. Market downturns that change the budgetary constraints. What happens when you don’t have the money to support the existing system and build the new thing? Obv, not supporting the existing system is not an option…

At the end of the day, think of this from the perspective of what you’re actually here to do — deliver product to the end-user. And to do that, Don’t Drink The Kool-Aid!

(And hey, if you’re one of those folks who doesn’t give a s**t about the end-user, and is basically here to score points, or take out the others, or some such, go away, this blog isn’t for you…)