I worked for one company that did most of their business in the mid-west. The had a small office near my house to do some software development. When the software manager there got fired due to mismanagement, he got replaced by Kevin Montana. The funny thing was that Kevin was located in the mid-west branch of the company. So he tried to manage the project remotely.
Every couple weeks Kevin would fly in to check up on the development team. And he would hold conference calls frequently to keep up with our progress. In theory you would think this would work. I guess they wanted to save money by not hiring another local manager. And for a while this seemed all right with my.
But when problems started to occur, I could not walk into my manager's office. I had to try to call up my manager instead. And Kevin was in charge of other projects back home. This double whammy took its toll. Had there been a local manager, maybe we could have communicated better and addressed a lot of the problems that kept popping up. Rather than continue to deal with this remote management situation, I switched to another company where my boss sat in the office next to mine. This arrangement had some other drawbacks. But at least I could walk over and chat about potential issues before they became huge problems.
