Manager
You: are a manager at CLSA based in Hong Kong (a lateral transfer from another organization) with 8+ years of experience.
At your previous organization, you did some high-profile work launching Open Shift usage with the organization. You are a big proponent of leveraging more open, cloud-based technologies for greater agility, as well as being a Scrum master.
In the eight months since you’ve been at your job, you’ve done a successful launch of a smaller scale upgrade to CLSA's CRM for KPI management.
This experience marked you as high potential in the organization.
Before this meeting:
Through your experience at your previous organization, you identified an important opportunity for keeping CLSA competitive/agile: building a new internal vendor management web application (cloud-native) leveraging Kubernetes (an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications) which will greatly speed up your ability to respond to changing business needs. Previously changes/redeployment could be quite slow, but this will allow for much faster adjustments. The tool underneath (Kubernetes) is already currently in use at many large organizations (Booz Allen Hamilton, among others).
According to your business analysis, it could save the CLSA XXXX (make up a number- up to you) hours per year.
There are also risks: the quick entry of competitors with similar innovations, reluctance to use more cloud-native apps, security concerns. Therefore, you need to move fast and launch well.
Your Senior Manager and has already convinced senior management to buy-in to the launch.
You want:
to be put you in charge of leading the new team that manages the launch.
to shift the project focus from Hong Kong as soon as possible— you would like to transition it to India in 1-2 quarters: as fast as possible for scalability/flexibility, especially as you have a lot of positive experience working with teams in India from your previous role.
Why do you want this role?
This would be a big opportunity for you and a change in your responsibilities.
Also, you feel that you deserve the opportunity to lead this project as it was your idea.
You want more experience working with other areas in ITMC, and also with presenting to/interacting with senior stakeholders.
Pros & cons:
You have not managed a team like this before, but you did manage project teams in your previous organization, albeit on a smaller scale and at a lower level.
You have also been a strong team contributor in all of the teams you’ve been a part of at CLSA in the last 8 months.
What are you worried about:
The senior manager may decide to make him/herself the project head and keep you as a junior member of the team.
This would be disappointing and require additional work and risk on your part with little access to rewards/positive exposure.
If the project is successful the recognition would go to the senior manager (if he/she is heading it alone).
If you are not selected to be the project head, you will have to decide if you feel you really have a strong future at this company or should consider other options.
You are worried about being stuck in a role and in a department reporting to someone who cannot support high potentials and give you the responsibility you deserve.
You would prefer staying in CLSA but, if turned down, you may be prepared to investigate better opportunities elsewhere.
Optional info but useful if needed:
You also looked at using Docker Swarm for this launch (an option with many similarities to Kubernetes), but chose Kubernetes because:
You know it better having launched projects with it in your previous organization.
It would be a first at CLSA, so using it would better position you as the project lead, as you have a track record with it.
Kubernetes seemed to be the best choice since it was being backed by Google, Red Hat, Core OS, and other groups that clearly know about running large-scale deployments.
Exhaustive documentation and an open community smoothen the learning process: it has a great user community.
As a user a few concepts like pod, deployment, and service are sufficient to go a long way: you don’t need to be an expert at it to do a lot.
Fault tolerance - the things it does under the hood to handle failure are near magical.
Rolling deployments with zero downtime.
Scalability, Kubernetes works regardless of how many pods it's managing; be it ten or a thousand.
Kubernetes supports higher demands with more complexity while Docker Swarm offers a simple solution that is quick to get started with.
As a last resort, you could do a combo: Kubernetes can work with Docker. Docker for Desktop (MacOS and Windows) even comes with its own Kubernetes distribution as they recognize its power.