This afternoon I got an e-mail from the lead analyst on my project. He wants my schedule through next February by 0800 tomorrow, so that he can compose an on-call calendar for the rest of the year (I’m not going to explain accounting vs. standard calendars here and now).
OK, good enough; I know that he has to have the information to present to his managers by 1100 tomorrow, and he is under heavy pressure from them to assign the on-call by weeks instead by days, as occurs now (and is under equally heavy pressure from the rest of the support group not to schedule by weeks). However…
I know the operations schedule through mid-November, so my planning for the last three months is based on WAGs. No one else on the team seems to want to declare, even tentatively, their availability past early July, so that tool for helping me schedule my days (or weeks, if it comes to that) on call is missing (and sorely missed). The concept of “planning” is essentially alien to my wife; ask her what she’ll be doing next week, and the most likely reply will be a punch in the mouth for trying to box her in. OTOH, telling her in September that I can’t go somewhere because I committed myself back in April isn’t likely to bring me joy, either.
::sigh:: Thanks for listening. Now tell me how lucky I am to have the opportunity to earn extra bucks six or seven times per month, and that there are people sleeping through the night in India…
Bah. WAG’s of schedules that had to undergo vertigo- and whiplash-inducing veerings of course at multiple times over the course of a year or so are the very lifeblood of any inefficent corporate entity. Therefore:
Live it, love it, embrace it! Throw darts at a calendar and invent milestones at the days they hit. Gaming stores sell dice of various geometries beyond the normal six-sided variety–get some d8’s and d10’s and such and start rolling them, writing down numbers to transcribe into the dates of the schedule. Use chalk to draw a giant calendar on the parking lot, and drop things (eggs are good!) from a few stories up onto them, and again take note of the dates landed on.
Remember, the purpose of communicating with levels of management above yourself is rarely the accurate transmission of information–it is the noble purpose of Making Them Go Away. Once they have Gone Away, you can get on with actually getting projects done.
Making Them Go Away is a process that must, sadly, be repeated regularly, it is like weeding to maintain a garden.
I’m in your bat. My ops manager wants my vacation dates, I don’t even know what I’m doing tomorrow, much less in 10 months from now. It’s not like I really have anywhere to go now anyways…
Reminds me of my old job working in a call center. They were such tight asses about the amount of time off the phones, that they enacted a policy stating that we could not take a particular vacation day if any 2 other people on our team had that day off. The policy was unofficially changed to apply to the whole helpdesk. Managers were denying vacation requests because there were too many people off from the whole helpdesk for that day… neverminding the fact that nobody on my own team had a day off scheduled for that day. There were even some situations where an employee’s vacation scheduled 6 months in advance was cancelled because management determined there were too many people off for that day.
It basically made us start scheduling our vacations and personal days off over 1 year in advance… just so that we could have that date locked in. What a pain in the a**! And even then, we still weren’t guaranteed to have that day or days off just because management THOUGHT there were too many people off.
This really bothered me. I always go on vacation in August for 4 days to Abbott’s Magic Get-Together. So here’s what I did:
I started keeping track of the days left until the event on my white board. Every day I would subtract one day, and make a bigger and bigger deal about it, until most everyone there (Management and the employees) knew that was MY time for vacation. I never once had my vacation changed or cancelled.
Looks like that psychology class in college was usefull after all.
First off, thank you for your kind words, Cyn. Even if you didn’t understand a word I wrote. (My project manager tells me that I must learn to write less densely. I’m trying.)
Now, the actual results. Yesterday, we did indeed have our telecon at 0800, and rather quickly hammered out what we thought to be the most critical parts of the schedule: second quarter and 2001 closes (it helped that we were all so groggy at that hour that we probably would have signed our own death warrants with equal alacrity and lack of comprehension of the long-term consequences). I did add a few more days to my “completely unavailable” list: the periods extending through the weekends of my wife’s birthday and our wedding anniversary (since I have no desire to spend my declining years sleeping on the lawn), and my own birthday (I’m damned if I’m going to get awakened by a page on my birthday). A job well done, or least adequately done, we all thought.
At 1330 we had our weekly team meeting. Our project manager informed us that the schedules weren’t really needed that day; she just imposed the deadline to be sure that we were actually thinking about the matter. Words failed me (at least, the kind of words that I could use and still be employed afterwards).
We did get an apology from the lead analyst today.
