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Creating the Ladder, and then Climbing

So here's a thing that happened this week: I got promoted at work.

My current organization has had significant growth over the last 12 months, including a pretty significant ramp-up in the team I'm on -- basically doubling the number of people in the team over my tenure at the job -- which has led to some serious conversation about what the layout of the organization should be. And this week, the management team rolled that plan out, including a promotional ladder for both managerial and non-managerial advancement, roles and responsibilities for each level, expectations for time-in-grade, and basically a bunch of stuff that bigger organizations have to worry about and smaller organizations ignore to their peril once they become bigger organizations.

So now I'm technically at least a part-time manager. Finding ways to shoehorn the much-needed time for managing people is going to be exciting given the current workload, but at least there's the intention of giving some of my time on the clock back to me to handle the non-ticket-related stuff. Which is pretty exciting to see. I've been given a really good, diverse team and a basically free hand as far as how that management should go, which is pretty cool to me. So here's hoping I can clear out some of my backlog and get to the job at hand, which is documentation, documentation, documentation...

I did have a moment of flashback when my boss let me know about the change, because she called and said "Hey, do you have time to talk? Give me a moment to bring in this other person," which immediately called back to the day when I was laid off, where I came out of a meeting planning six weeks of work and got pulled into a conference room where I was made redundant effective immediately. But once I managed to get my heart rate under control, the news was all good!

I've had several mentors I respect tell me that getting some management time under my belt will be extremely helpful in my career so this is a good thing on several levels, and I'm looking forward to the new challenges.

So go me! Here's to an interesting 2016.
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