The Day An Ant Saved My Project

For a number of years I kept an Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm® in my cube.  When I first set it up I was a stereotypical snarky, brooding, self-righteous Systems Administrator and what better way to advertise my  nerd-dom to everyone than having an Ant Farm prominently on display.  Well, at least that was part of it... Growing up I would often just sit for long periods of time and watch the huge colony of big red harvester ants in our back yard go about their business.    Spending a few minutes of watching the ants scurry around when I was having a bad day at work was somehow soothing and akin to hitting the reset button for me. 

NOTE: that same feeling of peace and tranquility does not extend to those itty-bitty ants that love marching across my kitchen floor and into my pantry, but I digress. 

As a kid I envisioned a giant ant colony blueprint and it was each ant’s job to find the exact grain of sand that fit in a specific spot on the map.  The great thing about the Ant Farm of course is that it gives one a view of what is going on below the surface. In spite of  what I had always perceived as order top side, underground seems to be another story completely.  Most tunnels were constantly changing and the ants regularly did things like blocking tunnels that their fellow workers had just opened up.

Skipping forward a few years, I was still an ant herder, (it is a farm after all), but by then I had transitioned into my first IT Manager job.  I was in my office stewing over a dilemma that had me stuck in a holding pattern for almost a month. A manager in one of the business units and I weren’t seeing eye-to-eye on what should have been a slam-dunk project.   It was a routine infrastructure modernization effort and he seemed to be doing everything in his power to keep that from occurring. I kept explaining what needed to be done and why, but our discussions were simply going in circles. I couldn’t understand why he just didn’t get it? At this point there was significant bad blood between the two of us.

Our discussions were simply going in circles. I couldn’t understand why he just didn’t get it?

I absentmindedly got up from my desk and wandered over to my bookshelf to look at the ants.  One group of ants was busily clearing a tunnel. Meanwhile, another group of ants were working on the opposite end of the same tunnel, filling it in from the other side just as fast as it was being cleared. After watching one particular ant make several round trips, I laughed thinking that if the ants on one side could see what the ants on the other side were trying to do, they would probably be a lot more successful.  Then I paused.  The self-realization was quick, profound and painful; the approach I was taking towards the other manager wasn’t any different. I was an ant going back and forth, pushing my agenda and making no headway.  Time to break the cycle.

The self-realization was quick, profound and painful

I met with the other manager that afternoon but I didn’t bring the usual bundle of slides and justifications for my project.  In fact I didn’t bring anything except an open mind and a different take on the conversation.  He sat behind his desk staring at his computer, clicking away at his keyboard. He only afforded me a brief glance and said, “Please make this quick. I’ve got a lot to do.”

“Obviously I just don’t get it”, I said to the other manager, “I keep defending my position, rather than trying to understand yours.   Can you please show me what you want this environment to look like when it is all said and done?”  

The other manager stopped typing and stared at me quizzically for a couple of seconds, a bit perplexed by this turn of events and clearly more than a little suspicious after weeks of stalemate.  He went to his white board and started scribbling a rough network diagram, explaining as he went.  Everything lined up with what I was trying to do except for the glaring exception of a legacy server that had been formally decommissioned long, long ago. 

When he was finished I asked why and how that server was even still around.  The reason was a home grown data preparation program I’d never heard of that was used exclusively by his team.  They couldn’t release their product without it.  For this reason, they had moved the server out of the datacenter and into their lab when it was decommissioned. They had given it a new IP addresses with the same name so that they didn’t have to change anything about their release process and kept the business unit running just as it had been.  Further questioning revealed that as the result of prior reorgs and layoffs, all of his original people were gone. There was no one left on his team who even knew how the program worked.  His current staff only knew how to run it.  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In our case if it broke, we’d have no idea how to fix it, so it Must. Stay. Exactly. As. It. Is.” he said, over articulating that last part.  The manager capped the whiteboard marker and after returning to his chair condescendingly asked, “Any more questions?”

So there it was. We were indeed operating at cross purposes. From his perspective I was the ant blocking off one of his tunnels.  He was pushing back against my project in order to stay put because that was his only perceived option.  

He was pushing back against my project in order to stay put because that was his only perceived option.  

I acknowledged  his predicament and then said, “I want to put my project aside for a minute.  We’ve got revenue at risk if your system isn’t available.  That’s clearly a higher priority.”  The other manager nodded quickly and shrugged in a manner indicating I was an idiot.

“Of course it is! That’s what I’ve been telling you all this time, but you haven’t been listening to me.”

Then asked if he had any concerns about owning a business critical application which is unknown and unsupported running on an end-of-life server with no service contract in a lab with no real redundancy.  The other manager’s face softened as I spoke.  After a long silence he said, “I’ve never thought about in those specific terms before. I'd have no idea where to even start. Is there a way you can help me with that?" 

I'd have no idea where to even start. Is there a way you can help me with that?

It only took us an hour to hammer out a migration plan. Instead of us both staunchly defending our positions, I now understood his concerns and he in turn understood mine and we had a common goal. Together we were able to brain storm a couple of workarounds which allowed him to keep his business running and me to move forward with my program. It required a lot of additional work for both his team and mine, but we did so jointly to ease the impact on everyone.  

Our collaborative effort was smashing success and the manager and I had forged a strong, lasting partnership in the process. The end result was that my project got completed on schedule, he had a much more robust, supported solution that could also be used by other groups in the company and I had learned a valuable lesson in collaboration that I’ve never forgotten. We had finally stopped moving the sand from one side of the ant farm to the other and had built a new tunnel together.