My last day in managed services is 30 September, 25 years after my career began. The technology changed beyond recognition in that time, more than once. What stuck was what the work taught me about how the world works, about people, and eventually about myself.
The lessons about the world came first. Most of the businesses I’ve worked in ended up somewhere nobody planned. The training provider I joined as a student became a managed service provider, because that’s where the work was, and the business followed it. The best strategy I’ve been part of since worked the same way. It started from what the work was already telling us and built from there.
The other one came from writing bids, including the ones I lost. Nobody buys the thing you think you’re selling. Every tender I wrote was ostensibly a comparison of technical approaches, but the ones we won came down to whether the client believed we’d still be answering the phone the week it went wrong. Technical elegance gets you shortlisted. Trust gets you the contract.
People took longer to understand, and the first lesson surprised me. I assumed the hardest person to convince of anything new would be the client, since they had the most to lose. It rarely was. Whenever I’ve tried to change how a team works, the people slowest to come round have been the ones already on my side, and I’ve come to realise they’re right to be. A client who backs a bad idea can walk away and blame you. Colleagues who back it have to keep living with it, and with you, long after.
The second was that judging someone else’s competence is a different discipline from having your own, and the more useful one. Each promotion or hire I’ve signed off on was a bet that my read on “good enough” would hold up once other people were relying on it. Nobody teaches you to make that call. You learn it by being handed responsibility for people before you feel ready. As far as I can tell, there’s no other way.
What I learned about myself took longer, and it isn’t what I’d have guessed. I came into this career convinced the job was being the best technical person in the room, and for a long time it was. Moving into management changed that. Once I was responsible for other people’s work, being technically right stopped being the point. The job became making sure other people could get it right.
Running the Techie Brunch Club and mentoring, through the British Computer Society and the London CTOs “meet-a-mentor” initiative, have taught me the same thing over and over. What you know only matters once someone else can use it.
That’s not a version of myself I’d have recognised when I started, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to get here. Add it all up and none of it was planned. Like those businesses, I went where the work was, and it kept pointing me towards people.
Where it points next is a story for next week…