Just gotta blow off some steam before my FOURTH meeting of the day
I’ve been working with a colleague on a huge, amorphous, ongoing-forever higher ed project.
I am more of a “forest” person, the colleague I’m working with (whom I am very fond of) is incredibly focused on the “trees” of a project we’re sharing, including looking at the bark, inner core, bugs, and so on. Every single little teeny tiny detail of every single thing she must analyze, discuss, write a long email about, then meet about (I’m exaggerating, but not by much). It’s not unusual for her to send me five emails a day of 1,000 words plus and schedule four or five meetings a week. She’s a true, passionate, believer in the project and incredibly knowledgeable and helpful. Despite all of this, she is very disorganized, paperwork is sloppy, etc.
I, on the other hand, am able to convey things in a sentence or two and think emails that exceed a paragraph are evil; meetings are essentially a waste of time (this applies to all meetings on Earth, IMHO). I look at the bigger forest picture, gloss over details that aren’t that important to getting things done, and don’t have the need nor want to discuss little details over and over. On the other hand, I don’t always attend to some details that really do need attention and I actually don’t think this project is useful for anything but generating data that no one will every look at again nor use. I can get impatient and cut corners, whereas she never does. However, I am very organized and I don’t think anyone would guess that I think the project is a waste of time.
Anyhoo, just needed to be cranky before heading to a two hour meeting about . . . nothing
I usually describe myself in interviews as “Results Oriented”, as opposed to “Process Oriented”. In my field of system implementation consulting, this distinction means something (to me, at least).
Consultants who come from a “big firm” background are often really good at documenting and methodology and templates, and when the project is over you will have a whole bookshelf full of binders full of deliverables - as if that is the goal. These are the folks that I refer to as “Process Oriented”. Whereas my background taught me that the goal is to get the system implemented. Consequently, I am less inclined to focus on extensive paper deliverables. Instead I focus on the tasks that get the system built. Documentation occurs, but it is more focused and streamlined, and the preparation doesn’t dominate the hours spent on the project. As you can imagine, I work well with people who have a similar background as I do, and less well with people who come from a “big firm” background.
The person you describe seems to fit into a third category? “Detail Oriented” perhaps?
Yes, I think this is a good category. I’ve never met anyone who delights in detail as much as she does. Having known her for a long time and interacted in any other situations, I’d say she’s a bit on the spectrum and is obsessive in ways that fuel her passions (she has a lot of irons in the fire and is incredibly enthusiastic about each one).
I slide more toward being impatient and very easily bored. I freely admit that I’m passionate about just a few things in my life and producing paperwork isn’t one of them.
I was going to say, she’s probably complaining about how she has to hold so many meetings just to get you to appreciate the details of the project. Ha!
But yeah, I’m more like you. I spend an insane amount of time in meetings and conference calls and it is usually just not the most efficient way to get things done. There are almost always more people than necessary. Lots of people only half paying attention.
You will only work about 8000 to 9000 days in your life; why spend any of them on projects like this? There are almost always other projects going on in any workplace; get yourself transferred to one you think is beneficial.
Same field. I’m an in-between: I believe that documentation is necessary if and only if it serves as reference for something else. Having a ton of documents nobody knows where to find, or can explain why we did them other than “because it was a deliverable” is useless; not having the processes documented at all is a bloody mess.
My last project was a mixture of both. Tons of documents, not a single relevant one.
I’ve had coworkers who were super-detail-focused that I helped with some monkey work and made sure they never, ever, figured out how quickly I’d done it or how little I’d read anything. By treating the huge pile of data as “zeros and ones” I was able to process it superquickly (including verifying that what I’d done matched the instructions received) where they would have taken twenty times as much - but the spot where they would have spent forever often was one I didn’t even have the access and knowledge to do. They’d check every line item to make sure the instructions for it were correct; I had to start by assuming they were.
I see this often and it is usually a deficiency in the overall project management that allows it to flourish.
If there is a clearly defined high level strategy and timeline, and everyone knows how their individual work-packages contribute towards it then you can cut out a lot of what the OP sees because the project manager can always pull the team back to the bigger picture and the “tree-based” colleague doesn’t get free reign to get lost in the detail.
Of course that requires for that PM-ing to be done well and having spent 25 years of my working life dipping in and out of such projects I can say that really good PM-ing is often in short supply. Also, similar to what others have said, I’ve seen plenty of intensely detailed GANTT charts, spreadsheets and diagrams that impress the powers that be and act as a proxy for actually achieving anything.
It’s not an option, it’s one of the requirements for my admin job. “Project” isn’t really the right descriptor, as it’s an ongoing assessment process related to maintaining college accreditation. I really do like a lot about the work, but as anyone in higher ed involved with assessments knows . . . it’s, er, changeable.
It’s not an option, it’s one of the requirements for my admin job. “Project” isn’t really the right descriptor, as it’s an ongoing assessment process related to maintaining college accreditation. I really do like a lot about the work, but as anyone in higher ed involved with assessments knows . . . it’s, er, changeable.
I’m very happy where I work, but everything that gets done here gets done in a “forest” mindset. Which is great, but often leads to the details just sort of happening according to the whims of whoever’s the most assertive or in charge. And thus there are like a million and one different ways things get done, because no one is willing to make everyone get on the same page with regards to the “trees”. I wish we had more meetings about and/or clear guidelines about expectations about the finer details. Because otherwise people (like me) spend time working on projects having been told the trees don’t matter, only to have to redo something when one person on the review list decides they like their version of trees better. And, the next time it might be a different person, or the same person but with a seemingly different set of priorities.
Ditto Novelty Bobble in that it’s all about project management. Clear plans/directions/processes/timelines can solve a lot of this stuff.
At least we like each other a lot.