Senior Manager
You:
are a senior manager at CLSA based in Hong Kong.
have 15+ years experience — an experienced IT professional with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry.
have an MBA, a PMP, and CISA (ISACA).
are focused on improving the efficiency of operations.
might be getting a big promotion this year to department head.
Your company wants:
new innovative programs (both for internal and client-facing use).
new program launches are a great opportunity for you to grow your reputation in the company.
Your partner is:
a new manager— a lateral hire from a competing organization.
marked as high potential.
ambitious.
Your partner (manager level) has proposed a good opportunity for your company: 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). You already persuaded senior management to buy in on the launch, but it needs to go very well and smoothly to succeed, as it is a new direction for the organization.
You are meeting the manager to decide how to: structure the team that will do the launch.
You want: to maintain control over all new launches: this is important to you both for your upcoming promotion and because this launch is mission-critical and needs to be done faster than normal to stay competitive. Time is of the essence: this needs to be done fast.
You also ideally want to be very supportive of the manager’s professional development.
Some notes:
If the manager can control his/her ego a bit, you are open to allowing him/her to work with you on this project in some higher capacity/role.
They need to demonstrate an awareness of how to deal with stakeholders in this project, so they should ideally ask you about this. At CLSA stakeholders will be cost-conscious and security-focused.
You could also give him/her another interesting role on the project.
You would be willing to allow the manager to help with presenting parts of the project to senior management and at the Design and Solution Council.
Or you can give the manager a more boring role which would work with his/her strengths, but not provide him/her with the exposure and experience he/she is looking for.
There are various groups you'll need to interface with: engineering, security, middle/front office, etc. Additionally, you'll need to consider whether to transition more of this project from Hong Kong to India or to hold it here for now. Personally, you feel with internal politics this is better run out of Hong Kong for the next 2-3 years. Later once it has been tested you can move it to Pune, but for the next year or so you feel there is too much going on to do it.
Optional info but useful if needed:
Ideally, you’d rather launch this with Docker Swarm. You prefer Docker Swarm (a similar option you have used before) over Kubernetes because:
There is no front end and anything attempting to provide a self-service model must be created currently.
It uses pretty new technologies so there is a relatively steep learning curve.
Many of the logs are difficult to decipher and too verbose to be useful.
Docker Swarm, when compared to Kubernetes, can deploy containers much faster and this allows faster reaction times to scale on demand.
While the development of Kubernetes has been happening at light-speed in the past year, and the community has grown…. you still feel it is too beta for CLSA.
If the manager is convincing though, you can be open to a Kubernetes/Docker hybrid (they work together well), but your preference is all Docker/Docker Swarm.