Bad planning or effective backstabbing? Dear Bob …You recently wrote about handling a service recipient who fails to plan. How about the head of another part of IT? We have our own VP Chaos, only he lives inside the tent.I’m the infrastructure architect/team lead in our IT group. My team provides the servers, connectivity, SAN, and software. We plan and implement the architecture changes, monitor the systems, and deploy patches. We try very hard not to get into crisis mode because 1) people make mistakes in crises, 2) crises cost money, and 3) the first two lead to lots of unhappy conversations that none of us like to have. No one has ever been shown the door here for making an honest mistake or having to spend a little extra cash, but we take pride in what we do and try to provide reliable service. I fully realize that while we love our IT geek world, that’s not what we get paid to do. We get paid to support the business, the business initiatives, and keep the cash coming in. My manager (also a VP) supports us well in this approach. One of the things I really like about my manager is that he’s never heard the word crisis. However, one of the things that really frustrates me about him is that he’s never heard the word crisis. He’s very even keel, which is great. When I need him to support me in some push back, I usually get some support, but in the end we shift the schedules and our VP Chaos — his peer — gets his way.I’ve worked with VP Chaos and his team for several years. My opinion is that he does not understand the technical part of what his department does. Here’s an example of an invented problem: Recently we (infrastructure) decided that the available disk space for a key database had become too low. We had about 2 months of growth space, and we needed to add more space for it. We put in the appropriate change documents to add space and give us additional months of growth.VP Chaos saw the documents (which is fine) but went ballistic. He wanted to know why we had let space get “critically” low (we hadn’t). He demanded to know why we didn’t have monitors in place (we do). He insisted we had violated policy (we hadn’t). He stormed around insisting that we would have to add even more space and do so that very afternoon (which was exactly what we had planned). The last email I saw from VP Chaos is that he would “address this with management.”I spent hours explaining to VP Chaos, two other managers, and a couple of members of my team that we were doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing. My manager asked me some questions, I answered them and offered my views on managing the storage. He agreed with me. I haven’t heard anything more since. It’s great that this particular tempest-in-a-teacup is over, but it took time and energy away from being responsive to real issues.VP Chaos invents this kind of crisis all the time, and gets away with it. The last time I raised this issue to a Director level manager, I was told, “You don’t want to go there,” and the conversation was ended.My best guess is that he’s someone’s golden-haired boy. Although, for the life of me, I have not been able to figure out who his patron would be or why. I can’t see what someone else would be getting out of protecting him so vigorously. In the end we get the job done. However, I’d love to have the time back that I spend responding to the imaginary crises invented by VP Chaos. There are other things we could do for the business if we had that time back. There are other tools we would like to test or build, but we aren’t paid hourly so we don’t have the luxury of doing that.I guess that’s the frustration. We could do so much more for ourselves, for the business, and even VP Chaos, if we could eliminate his crisis mode approach to the world.– Living with Chaos Dear Living …You aren’t living with a bad planner. You’re dealing with a fairly classic backstabber. He’s established a nice little positive reinforcement loop: Every time he makes a public stink about one of your “failures” he reinforces the logic of his having a higher status than you do (or your boss, who I presume is one of his peers).What this has in common with my comments to Coping with Chaos (“Handling a service recipient who refuses to plan,” Advice Line, 7/30/2008) is that the manager in question doesn’t have a problem. His management style is working well for him. He has no reason to behave differently. This is a battle you can’t win and shouldn’t try fighting. The battle belongs to your manager, and it’s up to him to decide what to do about it. Either he’s wise in the ways of corporate politics and realizes the fix is in; he’s wise enough in the ways of corporate politics to know he isn’t good enough at it to win; or he’s simply naive and figures doing a good job is the ticket to success, recognition and increased influence.This is one of those situations in which taking action will be risky all at once, while failing to take action will be less obviously risky because the risk will accumulate in small increments — what you’ve been experiencing up until now.The only reasonable course of action I can see for your manager is to carefully document a half-dozen examples of the kind you described to me; each on a separate fact sheet. Each will have to be clear, concise, easily grasped at a glance. Until they’re in this form your manager isn’t ready. Then your manager should sit down with the CIO, one-on-one. The subject: Poor teamwork in the IT leadership team and what to do about it.As is always the case in a difficult conversation, your manager must be relaxed, confident, professional and businesslike. There’s no place for self-righteous anger here. It will make matters worse, not better.In the conversation your manager should make it clear that he isn’t backstabbing. There’s a problem that has to be solved; he’s tried to address it directly with the offending manager without success; he’s completely open to discussing it with him again with the CIO as part of the mix as well; and his goal is to get the problem fixed. Assuming he, the CIO and VP/Chaos do sit down to solve the problem, your manager should press for a monthly review with the CIO of situations in which his team has needed VP/Chaos’ support, VP Chaos’ team has needed his team’s support, or the two teams (or two managers) have had to collaborate.He should report honestly and accurately, both successes and failures. Especially, he should find successes to compliment.This is, I’ll emphasize, a high-risk undertaking. The alternative, though, is what the ancient Chinese called “Death from a thousand cuts.” – Bob Technology Industry