BeingDispensible

How do you work yourself out of your current job?

That's been a favorite topic of mine over the years.

Being dispensable is what comes along with making yourself promotable. To be promoted, you should either train your replacement[s] or make your job unnecessary.

Contrast this with being indispensible: you get nothing but the baby sitting of the monster you've grown to understand. "Can't afford to send you to training..." You start losing currency in the marketplace.

I've managed to become dispensible by:

Documenting the guts of what I'd gotten stuck with.
Rewriting a monster into a simpler design
Training a peer for coverage - I like vacations sometimes
Holding walk-thrus to demystify the kludge.

BobLee 3/25/02

As a consultant, I ensure that I'm dispensible by charging a large daily fee. This keeps them thinking about how to get rid of me. JerryWeinberg 3/25/02

True, but that only works if you're an independent consultant, otherwise your management wants you to cling to them for billable hours.

How do you finesse the joy onto a new, eager soul?

BobLee 3/25/02

You have a bunch of options:

You can "Tom Sawyer" the job.
You can tell your boss you're going to quit (only if you mean this), if you don't hand off your old job and transition to a new role.
You can sabotage your changes. (Yuck.)
You can tell your boss you're going to cross-train everyone else in your role, and then start with group meetings. (At every group meeting, I'm going to take 20 minutes and teach people about my job.)
You can stop doing it and see who notices (should this work be done at all?).

JohannaRothman, 3/26/02

JR, I kind of like the "Tom Sawyer your job" metaphor. I can usually find someone who genuinely enjoys learning things that have become boring by repetition to me.

I detest project leads that have never served any time in maintenance - they have too much of a "just throw the meat over the wall" attitude to be trusted delivering things to production. Without some maintenance perspective, the same brittle problems keep showing up. A lot of software architecture is about this kind of time perspective. Tom Sawyering a new, gung-ho person into learning the perspective of time, change and entropy can be fun and liberating. I got myself off the certified one-and-only MAKE wizard role this way several times.

On another thread, we discussed planning for demise. This is a good strategy for many lingering products.

BobLee 3/26/02

There's another piece about becoming dispensable that just occurred to me the other day: Is it time for your company to kill the product or project you're indispensable to?

Sometimes, our organizations are too caught up in the "we've always done this" to reconsider. --JohannaRothman 2002.09.22

I remember in 1985 working for a big 3 TV broadcaster. My response to a question about whether I had a "full time consultant status" was a HUH? As an independent the last thing I wanted was a full time job!

Once I realized this was a client view, I adopted Jerry's POV. Charge more and make them suck up your lessons to get you out of there.

Internal "consultants" I have known that do well recognize their worth and value ... and promote this within the company.

Perhaps it is a sad fact that you need to learn how to be visible and then be invisible to be a successful consultant?

- BeckyWinant 9-23-02

Updated: Monday, September 23, 2002