Maybe they hired her to fundamentally change how the department operates. 
Hang in there, you’ve almost made it.
It depends. I always think it’s important to set up a regular cadence and communications plan. Maybe the team does a daily standup to coordinate work for the day. The manager has a weekly status call. Once a month there is an executive committee meeting to plan higher level goals. There’s some mechanism for tracking and assigning work.
It doesn’t have to be super detailed or arduous. Just predictable.
I’m seeing a lot of what the OP describes in my current client. There’s no structure or organization. Most of the team is focused on building this Powerpoint deck for the management layer above us/ It’s stupid because all they are doing is taking a bunch of reports from other systems and putting it into a big deck of all the dozens projects we “own” (which is to say "responsible for putting this status deck). I still have no idea about what we are actually supposed to “do” as a group, other than assemble a bunch of giant regulatory documents that no one on the team knows how to do.
The manager isn’t malicious like the OPs boss, but it’s stressful because she’s loud, demanding, and clueless. I think she might be stupid as well.
The point is a lot of organizations and managers are dysfunctional because they don’t know how to manage or organize work. So very often they resemble an elementary school soccer team where everyone swarms the ball or no one does. Focusing work on whatever is most visible to management or whatever fire is most urgent. And they think it works because it gives a perception of people being “always busy”.
I’m not there of course, but I suspect that a lot of the reason the group boss is loud, demanding and clueless is that she has no idea what her actual mission is. Because she and her peers are being managed in an equally unskilled manner by her boss. And et cetera right up the chain.
So few people understand how to design a business bureaucracy to achieve a coherent result. So instead the organization and workflows just happen. Driven by many competing forces, few / none of which are aligned around “accomplish the actual goals of the actual business”.
Once this tangled mess exists, then managers try ineffectually to operate a machine that cannot possibly work. All that comes out is the sound of clashing gears and heads banging on walls. All made worse of course once the tangled mess has been ossified by being semi-automated, so any organizational or workflow changes have to start with “changing the computer”.
And then the whole class stood up and clapped.
I agree. The only thing worse than being micromanaged is a clueless boss who doesn’t know whats going on. I appreciate a boss who follows up, when its in the spirit of situational awareness, not looking to criticize.
In all the Silicon Valley companies I worked for weekly one-on-ones with boss and each employee was standard. That helps, as long as they happen.
But when I was at Bell Labs, the number one complaint about performance review was that some bosses would say that someone didn’t accomplish a task they did, just that the boss was clueless and never checked. Clueless bosses were pretty common. We did surveys and meetings studying this, so it wasn’t just anecdotal.
Our production manager instituted a quick “Here’s what has to go out the door today.” meeting at 8:05 am every day. She timed it so that we’d all have to get to work on time.
And every meeting, someone would groan and say “I totally forgot about that!”
Twenty years later, I ran into her and told her that if not for those daily reminders, I would’ve been fired.
(ADD with a crappy memory. A couple of big projects would’ve ‘slipped through the synapses’ without her. And the Big Boss would not have tolerated something being late to a client.)
Just having some regular cadence of check-in meetings is enough so managers know what people are working on, employees know what they are supposed to be working on and someone actually cares if they do it.
I’ve worked at a few places (large banks and insurance companies mostly) where I was surprised they could even operate with how dysfunctional they were. People had either too much or too little work to do. Managers were largely absent or they “seagull” manage where they fly around looking busy, shit on everything, and then leave.
I was hoping to start looking for a new job in mid-September, but it looks like that’s not going to be possible. My only plan now is to ride this out as long as I can.
My chaos boss is now escalating her insistence on me using a free app instead of the professional software I need to do my job. She has a justification for every objection I have to using it, but she doesn’t understand what I do and how I need to do it. She is a narcissist, and she has said that she knows a lot about this, but in reality she knows almost nothing. Instead of allowing me to find a solution that will give her what she wants, she is demanding that I do it in a way that results in an inferior product and in a lot of frustration for me (but why would she care about that?)
Her buddy (the manager of our whole organization) is also tearing things up. We have programs that have been very helpful to people and that employees have been very involved in developing, and now he’s micromanaging and not letting us do things without his approval. I’ve heard that he’s not planning on staying in the job for much longer, so I think he’s going to destroy things and then leave us hanging. Morale is not so good right now.
Post deleted.
Sounds like your situation is quite different from what I (and I suspect others) previously suspected.
I wish you luck in figuring out an attitude and strategy for tolerating your current job for the indefinite future. I suggest progressively lowering your standards and expectations. Has always worked for me! And - amazingly - no matter how much you lower them, you can always go lower! 
THIS. It’s interesting to me that being able to execute “we need to have a regular scheduled meeting and this meeting will have some structure to talk about all the tasks we have to do” is a skill set – it seems so simple to me that I’d think that anyone could handle it, but it turns out that a lot of people (who are much smarter than me and have much more what I would think of as business-relevant skills) aren’t able to make this work!
Anyway, our team became a lot more functional and had a lot fewer communication snafus once we started having weekly check-in meetings. (Except for the one senior guy who kept missing meetings and then complaining that he was missing important information about the project… that we had discussed in great detail in the meetings. But I think that is sorted now.)
LOL, I almost snorted my water up my nose reading that. I actually think my manager is great at at a lot of things, but, uh, yeah, he can be a seagull sometimes.
I’m not sure I understand why you can’t even look. You can job search at home, after all.
As for the new software, could you collect quality metrics for the good software and the free stuff? Also be sure to log every impediment the free software puts in your way. That will come in handy when the idiot starts to blame you for the quality of your work going down, which of course could have nothing to do with the software she made you use. She is of course not going to document anything, so if it ever comes to a confrontation your information might come in handy.
It’s been nearly 2 months since you wrote this. Hopefully, that’s enough.
Also, if you are stuck there a while longer, research how to get the most out of the free software. Maybe it’s not quite as awful once you learn to use it as it is at first blush.
As long as clueless boss stays out of my way, I’m OK with it.
Same with me a couple years ago. Hated it as it does almost everything I need but not all.
Is she not listening or are you not doing a good job communicate it? Could a third person explain it to her?
Why? Is it related to ‘I don’t want to leave my buddies behind!’?
I used to think that, until i had a clueless principal. For years, everything was harder than it needed to be. Truly clueless never really “stay out of your way” because, at least foe us, make impossible promises, never spend money when it’s needed, refuse to address important issues, ignore poor instruction. . .and the kids are 1000 times worse when they know the proncipal doesnt even know any kid by name.
What does your IT dept have to say about that?
Professional apps will almost always have licensing and costs to deal with. The company may decide to go with free apps to avoid those issues. But the free software is often worse, so that’s the tradeoff. If the company makes the decision to take the cheap path, make sure they feel the pain of that decision. Use the crappy free tools and have things take longer and not be as good. Then maybe the company will realize it’s worth it to pay for software that works better and has actual support. My company ditched MS Office for OpenOffice to save money. But OpenOffice had so many problems that we eventually went back to MS Office.