The flight director is responsible for crafting the announcement notices, making
sure that they go out on time, scheduling the submitted work proposals
based on the interactions between them and the staff required, deciding on
any cuts for that maintenance window, monitoring the progress of the tasks
during the maintenance window, ensuring that the testing occurs correctly,
and communicating status to the rest of the company at the end of the maintenance
window. The person who fills the role of flight director must be a
senior SA who is capable of assessing work proposals from other members
of the SA team and spotting dependencies and effects that may have been
overlooked. The flight director also must be capable of making judgment
calls on the level of risk versus need for some of the more critical tasks that
affect the infrastructure. This person must have a good overview of the site
and understand the implications of all the work—and look good in a vest.
In addition, the flight director cannot perform any technical work during
that maintenance window. Typically, the flight director is a member of a
multiperson team, and the other members of the team take on the work that
would normally have been the responsibility of that individual. The flight
director is not normally a manager, unless the manager was recently promoted
from a senior SA position, because of the skill requirements
Depending on the structure of the SA group, there may be an obvious
group of people from which the flight director is selected each time. In the
midsize software company discussed earlier, most of the 60 SAs took care of
a division of the company. About 10 SAs formed the core services unit and
were responsible for central services and infrastructure that were shared by
the whole company, such as security, networking, email, printing, and naming
services. The SAs in this unit provided services to each of the other business
units and thus had a good overview of the corporate infrastructure and how
the business units relied on it. The flight director was typically a member of
that unit and had been with the company for a while.
Other factors also had to be taken into account, such as how the person
interacted with the rest of the SAs, whether she would be reasonably strict
about the deadlines but show good judgment where an exception should be
made, and how the person would react under pressure and when tired. In
our experience with this technique, we found that some excellent senior SAs
performed flight director duties once and never wanted to do it again. In the
future, we had to be careful to make sure that the flight director we selected
was a willing victim.