Managing

Someone, way, way, waaaaay up the chain of command in my company took a good idea (make sure that project QA staff doesn't feel constrained to fudge their audits and reviews to always turn in good results) and performed some idiot extrapolation (project QA staff should not actually report to the project manager, but to a separate line manager).

I know how they got there, and there's a certain logic to it, but it's wrong. Changing the reporting line doesn't help if the separate line manager isn't in the same physical location as the QA staff and will still have to be relying on the project manager for performance reviews. In fact, it makes things worse, because now the QA staff has to report to two different managers, one of whom has an excellent understanding of the company's overarching QA goals, and one of which has an excellent understanding of the specific project's needs. Anyone want to guess how often those two things actually line up?

To make matters even more exciting, when they changed my manager from my local boss to the remote manager up in NoVA, they didn't give us enough warning to take care of the staff that reports to me. Those people aren't actually QA (because I'm both QA and CM for my office -- and I'd venture a guess that only maybe 25% of QA managers out there are really and truly full-time QA; most of us get stuck with a lot of additional tasks that don't necessarily fall under the QA heading) but because the system is built on direct-line reporting, my three subordinates all got moved out of this office's chain of command.

Which screwed up the office's funding (there's an overhead bucket that is directly tied to the number of people working for the project manager, and suddenly it lost 4 people when it should have lost only 1) and subsequently screwed up a lot of other things. A promotion that had been entered in the system and approved mysteriously disappeared, etc.

The solution to this, which we enacted yesterday, was to move those people out from under my management and into someone else's chain of command. I'll still do most of the management, but someone else will be in charge of doing the paperwork.

As much as I won't miss the paperwork, this is not actually all that great for me, because now my company record shows that I had a staff of 2-3 for several years, and now I don't have a staff at all -- which means when it comes time for me to seek my next raise or promotion, my supervisor -- who, recall, doesn't actually work at my physical location and therefore has no real reason to know that I'm still acting as manager for these folks -- won't see that I've done anything to warrant it. While the project manager, who sees me nearly every day and knows exactly how much work I do, has pretty much no say at all in my compensation, aside from delivering glowing informal reviews to my NoVA supervisor and hoping that they're not assumed to be hyperbole.

I get that this system is supposed to keep the project manager from putting negative pressure on me to do my job in a dishonest way. But the system doesn't actually protect me from that, and at the same time insulates my supervisor from any rewards the project manager might feel I was due.

At least I don't have to do the paperwork anymore.