Good line manager leaving

[Smeghead]

Not too sure if this is a rant thread or "asking for advice" thread. Maybe a bit of both.

I work in system support (help desk basically) for a large company, in a small team of 4 (inc me); each of us specialise in a separate program that the company uses, which all talk and interface to each other in varying ways.

My line manager announced to my team recently that he's leaving, and it's left us a bit shell-shocked. We unanimously agree that he was a great line manager, and was very hands on. While we mainly specialised in our programs, he knew all of them himself, and could dip in and out and fill in the gaps between us very well. He also knew the processes of multiple departments in the company in and out, so he would push for business improvements and program enhancements, often at the benefit of multiple departments.

The rest of us simply don't have enough experience to be able replace him in any sort of meaningful way, and the head of our department has never seemed to give us the time of day, which I suspect is one major factor in my manager leaving. I don't have much confidence that the head is even considering arranging a replacement, and even if there is one, I can't see them being anything but a glorified project manager. They won't know the processes or be able to dip in to offer support in the same way.

My main concern at the moment was my specialist program, I supported kind of together with him. The others in the team have had virtually zero exposure to it, as they've been busy with their programs (similarly I know relatively little about their programs). So support for that is now going to fall 99% on me. Not only that, but we've been preparing for the past ~10 months to go live with another new program, which kind of links together with the program I already supported, so it kind of naturally fell on me to pick up that and all the testing and go-live prep, with my manager supporting me. We're on the cusp of going live with this within the next 2 months.

My team has had a chat. We're all concerned about the impacts this will have on us, but I'm absolutely dreading it, because I'm going to have 2 major programs with all the questions coming to me. It's inevitable I'm going to get overwhelmed, and I can't see any other outcome than push through till I burn out. Plus I feel like I'll be letting down the team, because I feel like I won't have time to help pick up the slack that's going to fall on them with their programs.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

Transfer skills to other people pronto.

 

[Smeghead]

Transfer skills to other people pronto.

While that would've/would be ideal, and we did try to have weekly sessions between us to do just that, it just hasn't worked out the way we wanted. If it wasn't one of our programs completely crapping itself and the "speciaist" needing to run off during session to try to fix things (and being 3 separate systems, it would often be any one of the 3 at different/the same time), it was another major project which occupied us all, like a major version upgrade which needed us to re-test all the integration and interface between the systems, on top of systems crapping themselves...it's just been non-stop support or upgrading. I'm probably underselling the complexity of it, but there are hundreds of concurrent users per system, doing literally thousands of transactions per second, all talking to each other through flaky interfaces which could break or error for one reason or another at a moment's notice.

At the end of the day, it's a resource issue. My line manager has constantly been trying to get another member in, and was always shot down or humoured till it was eventually forgotten about. I don't blame him for getting fed up and leaving.

 

[ivrytwr3]

Sounds like your manager has timed this deliberately. Guess he was more ****** off with the company than you knew. Who leaves at such a critical point of a project without an ulterior motive?

But that's not your issue, raise your concerns, do the job you're paid for - if the project crashes, that isn't your responsibility.

 

[Terminal_Boy]

Find out where your line manager is moving to and see if they have any open positions in the team he’ll be leading.

 

[HangTime]

Sounds like your manager has timed this deliberately. ..... Who leaves at such a critical point of a project without an ulterior motive?

People leave jobs all the time for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes that coincides with critical phases of a project. Remember this project is likely just one of many this manager gets involved in, it's just another brick in the wall to him rather than being someone drafted in specifically for that project who will want to see it through to completion so they can leverage that experience on future engagements.

For some managers, not leaving during a critical phase of a project would basically mean never leaving because there will always be some project that impacts them in some way entering a critical phase.

 

[dowie]

We unanimously agree that he was a great line manager, and was very hands on. While we mainly specialised in our programs, he knew all of them himself, and could dip in and out and fill in the gaps between us very well. He also knew the processes of multiple departments in the company in and out, so he would push for business improvements and program enhancements, often at the benefit of multiple departments.

The rest of us simply don't have enough experience to be able replace him in any sort of meaningful way, and the head of our department has never seemed to give us the time of day, which I suspect is one major factor in my manager leaving. I don't have much confidence that the head is even considering arranging a replacement, and even if there is one, I can't see them being anything but a glorified project manager. They won't know the processes or be able to dip in to offer support in the same way.

So one of you guys would perhaps be a better choice than a random external hire. you might not know the business as well as your current manager but you know it a bit, you know at least one of the software programs used and must have some idea about the others, a new hire might not know any of them or perhaps might also only be familiar with one of them too but not as used by you and won't be familiar with the company etc..

Suppose you were to become the manager, they'd need to hire someone to support the product you currently support - you had to start somewhere too right?

So why not apply for the job - ensure they hire a replacement for you, initially you'll need to spend time training the replacement but then hand over more tasks to them giving you time for the management role and to get exposure to the other applications and get to the sort of positon your boss was in.

Of course, you could also stick your CV out there too - if you don't get the job/get passed over in favour of another colleague (or worse a bad, external hire) and/or if things get a bit silly/chaotic with this manager gone then perhaps time for you to chuck it in and move elsewhere, leave the dumpster fire to the senior person who could have better resourced your team a while ago.

Sounds like your manager has timed this deliberately. Guess he was more ****** off with the company than you knew. Who leaves at such a critical point of a project without an ulterior motive?

Why do you need an ulterior motive to leave - people get called by recruiters all the time, if another opportunity sounds really good then no point shooting yourself in the foot worrying about some misplaced loyalty... if you've got some flexibility then sure, it's better to find a convenient time to leave, plenty of time for handover etc.. but the company has set the notice period required for your role, if they wanted to negotiate to lock you into a longer notice period then they were free to do that.

It works both ways - how many companies would agree to postpone a redundancy for you and keep paying you for another few months because the timing isn't convenient for you - getting an extension built on the house, wife just had a baby etc..