Transitions

Transitions, they happen all the time in life, you transition from crawling to walking from high school to college from college to the workplace.

A year ago I took over as Director of Operations at the retirement facility. I wasn’t given much direction, just a “make it work” directive. I was charged to build a maintenance department, which at the time was only one person, handle all renovations, remodeling and turning over rooms as they came available. I was also tasked with keeping an overloaded and dying server afloat, while getting bids to buy a new server. Two other operational problems that I was tasked to deal with was keeping a phone system on its last breath alive long enough to replace it and a nurse call system that was about to be shut down that I needed to find a working alternative to. Those were the easy things I had to do, the toughest part of the job was trying to bring a (how do I say this nicely…), hmmm, a staff for which a propensity to comprehend anything technology related was lower than that of a rock (yeah that’s a fairly nice way of saying it). With that came any and all operational problems and projects that seemed to arise on a daily basis. It wasn’t easy, there were times that I wanted to pull out all of my imaginary hair, and other times I just felt lost.

The majority of my time was spent on doing maintenance tasks. In a facility this size merely having one person on the staff was just silly, so I spent my time doing all I could do to make it work. Building maintenance isn’t my strong suit, but anything I could do and anything I could figure out I would do so I could have my maintenance worker do the harder tasks. First thing I did was start to use Basecamp, a project management website built by 37 signals. Before I took over all the maintenance tasks and requests were written on paper slips, these slips would get lost or misplaced and there wasn’t a way to follow up or look up and see if the item had been completed or even received by the maintenance staff. With Basecamp it gave me and other department heads the ability to bypass the paper and directly enter each item, this way there was a record of everything, it also provided a good way to communicate on each project and when something was completed they would be notified. There was a little resistance, but eventually everyone went along with it.

Through it all I achieved a lot, today we have a new server, a new phone system and a new nurse call system. Today nearly a year later I’m handing the reins of the maintenance department over, its going to be an adjustment not working and spending most of my time doing work to make the physical plant of the facility better, but I’m leaving the department  (well I’m leaving them a department) in good standing and in good hands.

Even though I know I did a good job in forming and installing a system that works much better than the system that was in place its still hard letting go. There are still dreams that I have for the facility that I hope aren’t lost now that I’m not steering the ship Letting go isn’t something I’m good at, but its something that I have had to deal with almost continually over the last year, maybe this time I’ll learn my lesson.