Every company has these people, but what’s new at my current place is that the work preventer is very highly placed, immediately below the C-suite. He’s got it arranged so that all of our external publications have to go through him first. He claims he just wants to be a rubber-stamp approver, but he’s such a micro manager that it takes us several tries to get anything past him. It’s really irritating because he will abort a publication by telling us to do work that we’d already done months ago (so we have to spend time proving that to him), or suggest alternate designs to software solutions just prior to the implementation date, among other bad behavior. We have to spend time explaining to him all the things we’ve done so far, and why, or make revisions to our publications as per his feedback even if they don’t make any sense just to get them out. (By “not make any sense” here’s an example: he just told us to ask a customer if they were okay with us mentioning them by name in our publication as being the last customer to comply with our implementation. Why in heck does he want us to embarrass an external customer in front of an entire industry? I can’t imagine the quality of drugs he’s on for that one.)
The second ones coming in two flavors: the least common one involves replacing everything again. The most common one has ten different systems to do any given task, and figuring out which system needs to be used in which case requires wisdom beyond that of Solomon, speed beyond that of Hermes and to have bald Fortuna bound to the wall by her hair…
The best company I worked for, where we did things that had been labeled “impossible” (6 year “change the whole IT landscape” project: on target, on time and on fucking budget! Well, actually under fucking budget), was matricial (the horror, according to the PMI…), had document formats which were much looser than usual (Ops’ process documents were Visios; Finance, Excel; Sales, Word), people who were dedicated to Doing a Good Job, a very low amount of leeches, and manuals that were really and truly useful at oh-God-a.m. It’s not in the labels, it’s in the 'tude.
Oh God. Yes. The “well, we all hate this system, except we are pretty dependent on it to do Task A…so we will install a new system to do Task B-J.” - Eighteen months later. “Well, we all hate this system, except we like what it does with task C…” And then there is “everyone in the company uses this system - well, except for this engineering group - they decided to use this system - so just for their stuff, you have to do this…”
Needless to say, the people who like what it does are usually not the people at the other end going into ten different systems to get their job done.
And of course, the first thing that’s split? Documentation, if any*. In my current job I’m having problems remembering where I’ve left my GiveAShit, but that’s actually a Health and Safety requirement, because any time I find it I look at the zillion systems we have and freak out… better if I just don’t find it.
- The company which installed the systems I support apparently did not have a QM department. Documentation, what’s that? Manuals, uh? About half the tickets we get are for things on the level of “I tried to save and got an error message! [screenshot showing the window that asks where do you want to save the file]”. Some of the users have a pirate pile of manuals (collated from when someone answers a ticket with a good explanation), but I haven’t heard that and neither have you.
See if he’s okay with mentioning that they were the last FORMER customer to comply with the implementation…
I have an interesting post script or update to this thread. Please note that I started the thread by admitting that I’m a cynical drone who’s only here for the paycheck (and some reasons why).
My manager rewarded me for my good work with an 8% raise and promotion (just a step promotion, like BA level 2 to BA level 3).
Knock me down with a feather. At the risk of sounding ungrateful, I have to admit that it didn’t inspire me to work harder. Let me explain why. Well, in late summer I was pulled off that horrible project that I described earlier and put full time on this external documentation team. What this team is supposed to do is maintain data processing documentation for our external customers. It assumes the reader is intimate with the business domain, contains many unwritten assumptions that the reader knows what it’s referring to, is disorganized and poorly written. In reality we haven’t been successful at making any improvements because this team that I’m on values debate more than accuracy or timeliness. They love to argue and will spend hours at it, and don’t seem to care at all if customers are waiting for a particular clarification to be published.
Every time I’ve been asked to draft some changes or new content, in the internal review meetings they tear what I’ve done completely to pieces, sending me back to the drawing board. Every single time. I have “co-authored” things with one of these “debate team” people thinking that it would help me learn to write better and maybe they’d be less critical and still end up having to rewrite it all. It’s just a horrible, unproductive team and I’ve realized that I CAN’T STAND it. I spend most of my time on internet forums like SDMB and do the bare minimum work to get by. And I got a raise for that?! I’m not exactly sure what I’m being rewarded for.
There’s another thing that I HATE: being introduced to a product or topic and then suddenly people are referring to me as the guru or expert in that thing. Especially given the above, where it’s been pounded very firmly into my head that I don’t know what I’m doing, and other people in the company assume I’m an expert? It sets my teeth on edge.
I’ve been unemployed for a year now. Started out in tech writing. Let me know whether you’re hiring.