Are Trust and Delegation Four-letter Words?

IT professionals are a hardworking group. We carry a lot of weight on our shoulders, a testament to our past and future successes. Yet, sometimes we have to distribute that weight evenly across the backs of others. No, this is not because we don’t want to do something. I’m sure that any of you, while capable of performing a task, would never ask another person to do something you wouldn’t willingly do yourself. No. Delegating activities to someone else is actually something we all struggle with.

Trust is a huge part of delegating. You're not only passing the baton of what needs to be done to someone else, but you’re also trusting that they’ll do it as well as you would, as quickly as you would, and -- this is the hard part -- that they'll actually do it.

As the world continues to evolve, transition, and hybridize, we are faced with this challenge more often. I’ve found there are some cases where delegation works REALLY well, and other cases where I’ve found myself banging my head against the wall, desk, spiked mace, etc. You know the drill.

One particular success story that comes to mind involves the adoption of Office 365. Wow! My internal support staff jumped for joy the day that was adopted. They went from having to deal with weird, awkward, and ridiculous Exchange or Windows server problems on a regular basis to... crickets. Sure, there were and still are some things that have to be dealt with, but it went from daily activity to monthly activity. Obviously, any full-time Exchange admin doesn't want to be replaced by Robot365, but if it's just a small portion of your administrative burden that regularly overwhelms, it's a good bet that delegating is a good idea. In this particular use-case, trust and delegation led to great success.

On the other hand, I’ve seen catastrophes rivaled only by the setting of a forest fire just for the experience of putting it out. I won’t name names, but I've had rather lengthy conversations with executives from several cloud service providers we all know and (possibly) love. Because I’m discussing trust and delegation, let’s briefly talk about what we end up trusting and delegating in clouds.

• I trust that you won’t deprecate the binaries, libraries, and capabilities that you offer me
• I trust that you won’t just up and change the features that I use and my business depends on
• I trust that when I call and open a support case, you’ll delegate activities responsibly and provide me with regular updates, especially if the ticket is a P1

This is where delegating responsibility and trusting someone to act in your best interest versus the interests of themselves or some greater need beyond you can be eye-opening.

I’m not saying that all cloud service providers are actively seeking to ruin our lives, but if you talk to some of the folks I do and hear their stories, THEY might be the one to say that. This frightful tale is less about the fear and doubt of what providers will offer you, and more about being aware and educated about the things that could possibly happen, especially if you aren’t fully aware of the bad things that happen on the regular.

In terms of trust and delegation, cloud services should provide you with the following guarantees:

• Trust that they will do EXACTLY what they say they will do, and nothing less. Make sure you are hearing contractual language around that guarantee versus marketing speak. Marketing messages can change, but contracts last until they expire.
• Trust that things DO and WILL change, so be aware of any depreciation schedules, downtime activities, impacts, overlaps of changes, and dependencies that may lie within your business.
• Delegate to cloud services only those tasks and support that may not matter to your production business applications. You want to gauge how well they can perform and conform to an SLA. It’s better to be disappointed early on when things don’t matter than to be in a fire-fight and go looking for support that may never come to fruition.

This shouldn't be read as an attack or assault on cloud services. Instead, view this as being more about enlightenment. If we don’t help make them better support organizations, they won’t know to and will not improve. They currently function on a build-it-and-they-will-come support model, and if we don’t demand quality support, they have no incentive to give it to us.

Wow! I went from an OMG Happy365 scenario to cloudy downer!

But what about you? What kinds of experiences with trust and delegation have you had? Successes? Failures? I’ll offer up some more of my failures in the comments if you’re interested. I would love to hear your stories, especially if you've had contrary experiences with cloud service providers. Have they gone to bat for you, or left you longing for more?