May 22, 2008 at 10:52 am
I know I am probable beating a dead horse, but in the your example, your manager was incorrectly applying standards, if you have an existing system that uses 2 digit years, then any additions to that system should stick to that standard, but when designing a new system using 4 digit years would not be wrong or inconsistent.
First: He's the manager in charge of the standards committee. He gets to decide what's the right way.
Second: He's the type of person that gets on standards committees because go getting quality driven risk takers have better things to do.
Third: Every system in that installation was expected to be interoperable so on some level they were all considered branches of the same system. So all protestation to the contrary you actually agree with his decision.
For instance as a DBA when I go into a new job or inherit a new server, I immediately check the backup design. My baseline is Full Backups weekly, daily differentials and hourly tx logs for transactional systems. If these are not in place then I put them in place. Then as I learn more about the system I adjust. Sure it's not exact, but that is where I start for consistency and then I work on the quality.
How is that making consistency your priority? You are ignoring company standards to base your decisions on your personal baseline for quality.
On one level that's exactly what I'd do these days but back when I was younger I would still WANT to do that but before I did I'd read the standards manual, discover that the new schedule contradicted company standards (standards that might obviously have been designed around flat file system requirements and therefore not even have a provision for differential backups), ask for permission to do it differently and get rebuffed by the standards committee.
You put quality first and call it consistency.
I worked at one company; Baxters. That actually had a system for making changes to standards. I found 3 or four that were seriously out of date technically. So over the course of 3 months I sent emails to the address dedicated to receiving such suggestions. I'm sure you know what's coming... After about 4 months of not hearing back I followed up and discovered that no-one was even using that email box any more. They still enforced standards but they didn't follow their own standards for updating standards.
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