For those in IT or if you're working in a business division that's affected, what are your thoughts on the current IT Change Freeze? Do you think it's needed and is it being communicated effectively?
Curious on what everyone is thinking rn.
10 replies (most recent on top)
@28n Murph the Smurf knows how to wow BB with PowerPoint slides and commits to "stretch goals" that he knows he'll never meet. But this buys him a few more years when BB may be cashing out after the break-up of 3M in to a number fractional Ms. BB may not have a crony he likes from his past connections that would come in and take a role like what the Smurf is doing. There is no long-term job security in IT if the company is breaking up. Just 2 years or so of work to spin the SAP pieces out.
M Murphy is a horrible and unreasonable leader. It’s crazy that 3M leadership continues to put up with him being in charge. He should have been shown the door a couple years ago…. (Or better yet not been hired).
It’s absolutely ridiculous. If IT was effective, change freeze wouldn’t be needed. Many big shops don’t have change freeze/windows anymore. 3M IT is not effective.
The it nerds have ascended from the basement…
@1cf this change freeze, by itself, isn't abnormal or mishandling of the company in any way.
The extending of the change freeze is likely because either A) an important financial system was disrupted; or B) there's some kind of investigation and we need to preserve the state of things during that.
Given that 3M has spent a lot of time in the courtroom over the last few years, my money is on the latter.
@1b9 thank you so much for that reply. I had no idea that this was happening. It seems that the powers that be, are disrupting every corner of this once great company. Crumbling from within.
@1ag Very good question to ask! A Change Freeze may differ by company but it essentially is a period where any IT changes (think software updates/releases) are halted for a certain length of time. This tends to happen around when a company is performing significant business functions like closing the books for the quarter or during holidays since the intent is to minimize risk of things breaking.
What's going on at 3M is that the CIO hastily changed the freeze period dates and essentially extended it from 2 weeks to about 1 month. And basically, if you want to implement any type of change you have to go through several layers of management, including the CIO for approval. As you can imagine, this has disrupted a lot of major projects and limited what we are able to do right now. Plus it doesn't help with feeling like we are being micromanaged to the extreme.
What is a change freeze? (I'm not in IT)
It is all around unfortunate that ONE person ruined things for hundreds of us. Not sure what else there is to say.
In early June, I was given a deadline of June 30th to complete a project.
Now there's the extended change freeze, and the attitude is that there's a change freeze at the end of every month, so I should have been prepared.
Leadership is unreasonable and unwilling to understand reality.