Ummm… not fallout, precisely, but the GM approached me today and asked if I would be open to taking on more responsibility for managing the overall team.
Erp.
Damn finance dept insists on using Times New Roman in their spreadsheets. It looks like ass, reads poorly, and makes me stabby. I’m tempted to embed a macro to force a font style on everything that comes through me.
I need to trust my instincts more often. Was forwarded a communication from a third party, wanting us to intervene in a dispute between a client and themselves. I spent a few hours, off-and-on, trying to figure out why we would even want to do so, and even if so, what we could possibly do.
Third party pitches a sob-story about how our client is horrible, taking advantage of them, etc., and telling us that we need to take legal action to intervene. The e-mails are far from professional*, from their end, and it reeks of a personal vendetta to the effect of “Now I’m gonna tell your parents on you!” for his intention of attempting to involve us.
Thinking I could be forgetting some rationale / purpose for us to get involved, I go to several co-workers, fill them in, and it’s a general consensus of, “As long as our client is paying us, why would we want to step in, interfere with their business, and risk poisoning the well of that business relationship?”
Had I just trusted my gut, I could’ve saved some time. At least now, I’m CCed on all their exchanges. Makes for some entertaining reading. I’m thinking this may only be settled by cage match.
*In hindsight, receiving e-mails typed in Comic Sans, with a baby blue background, should’ve been my first clue that I wasn’t dealing with the sharpest businessmen.
First day of renovations (for me, I was off yesterday when they really got started) is now done. So much noise. Such a headache. Such an incipient sinus infection.
If I can make it through the next month without walking off the job it will be a miracle on par with the feeding of the 5000.
That wasn’t the miracle. The miracle was conjuring up twelve emply baskets for the leftovers…
Congratulations.
Congratulations… and wow.
“Only if there’s money involved”
My background is “old school” software engineering where we didn’t have any business analysts or project managers or QA testers, nothing like that. When assigned projects, I would have to do my own requirements gathering (talking to end users), do my own design, my own programming, my own testing, and ensure that I delivered all the promised features on or before the promised date. So I know the hard parts of all those jobs, but they are kind of easier when it’s a team of one.
I mention this as background information because the following rant can be mistaken as a rant about the programmers. I’m now a business analyst and I’m actually ranting about the lack of project management at my company. TL;DR: we do agile badly and it confuses me.
I just got put on another project, in the middle of it this time due to some staffing changes. Again, the developers are forging way ahead before the requirements are figured out. I hate being verbally asked what the requirement for something should be in a meeting and have to say either I don’t know or I’ll have to figure it out and get back. It makes me feel stupid. I hate it when the developers have to stop their work and wait for me to figure things out.
Is there a way to do agile where the BA writes the requirements for a sprint before the developers code to it, sort of you know, coordinated like a well-oiled machine so that nobody is stuck waiting or looking stupid?
There’s a button you can get that says, You guys start writing code and I’ll go find out what they want. Sounds like your situation. 
I don’t know Agile that well, but the one time I worked in that environment they were doing the requirements the sprint before the developers started coding.
Twice last week, my supervisor decided to have a staff meeting. She asked me to reserve a meeting room, which I did, and I showed up for the meetings. Both times, I ended up sitting there alone for 15 minutes. She decided not to have the meetings, but couldn’t take a minute to let me know. :mad: I feel like such a valued member of our team.
(I’m sure you’re all wondering why I sat there for 15 minutes. Because nobody can show up for meetings on time, so we usually start meetings 15 or 20 minutes late.)
Gaw everything at work has been a mess. A d I’m sick, and on my day off i keep getting tagged with fires that need putting out — and I just want to chug nyquil and sleep.
The way we do it is the BA has everything figured out at least at the epic level, and then we do sprint planning where the BA and the devs sit down and together write the stories with input from all parties. In a perfect world, that process happens a few days to a week or more before the stories get dragged into a sprint; in practice, I can’t say that we’ve NEVER planned the sprint, pointed stories, and dragged them into a sprint in the same meeting. We really try not to do that though.
If stuff isn’t even done at the epic level before they want to start coding and I was the BA, I’d tell them “go fix bugs, work on technical debt, or learn some new technology. We’ll be ready to plan the sprint in <x> days” then go work my ass off to get the epic together.
Just tried to use our new, “improved” in-house travel reservation system. Implemented because the company must know where you are at while traveling. Which makes sense for international travel, but is just a cover for the travel agency kickback to someone’s buddy as regards domestic travel, I suspect.
Anyway, it locked up my entire computer three times. Hid flights I could clearly see on the carriers’ websites, more expensive than the carriers’ websites, and locked up again when I tried to put in my corp credit card info. (Why isn’t that already in the system? It’s a corporate card!)
Fortunately, we got an email restricting travel while I was in the midst of three more complete computer lockups, so I finally went to my boss with that as justification to skip that trip and just phone in when needed. But my real reason was my unwillingness to deal with booking travel anymore. I can hardly wait until our expense systems are moved over to SAP, as is rumored…
And the newest replacement hire of three that are needed, called in sick on her fourth day. Not just any sick, but a panic attack because she was scheduled at 9am while working til 8pm the day before. Um. This is veterinary work. It’s how all schedules work everywhere. But using an anxiety disorder makes it interesting. We have a 90 day introduction period during which calling in should lead to immediate dismissal, and it’s certainly not paid.
Monday morning team meetings are NOT the place to walk in and immediately run down a list of minor and inconsequential mistakes by your co-workers that were made in the last week, that are already resolved, and everyone already knew about.
This is just shitting the bed. You’re beginning the work week by tearing down your co-workers in front of each other and generally being a huge asshole. There is nothing productive or professional about this behavior. You’re not the manager or team lead, shut your damned mouth, worry about your own projects and stay the fuck out of mine.
My supervisor, who I’ll call Mr. Dicky McDick, might have screwed up big time, and I’m just the person to put the screws to him!
Quick backstory: At my government agency, we had 2 manager/supervisors, and each of us worked for either one or the other. I had the really good, reasonable guy as my boss. I heard a lot of stories from the workers under McDick about how he was a micromanager who would not hesitate to throw his employees under the bus while simultaneously stabbing them in the back. So of course, back in September the good manager left and McDick became everyone’s supervisor (and there’s no sign of when they might replace the good manager). So I got to experience the joys of getting meaningless, interoffice memos back for a single, arguably unnecessary grammar correction, or being told I was wrong on a case even though a) it was later discovered I was right; and b) his justification for why I was wrong was because even though I followed the handbook, I needed to “read between the lines” of the regulations (which is insanely untrue). These are only two of many examples of McDick’s “management style”. Two of our employees decided it was time to retire rather than take more of his crap.
Our agency does performance reviews at the halfway point, and end of the fiscal year. Last week we got an email saying he was going to have a quarterly performance review for each of us. This didn’t sit right with me, so I checked the union-management agreement, where it says “the employee shall have one (1) progress review meeting by the midpoint, barring exceptional circumstances.” Since he can’t cancel the midyear meeting (the results of which have to be recorded in the computer system), he has violated the agreement. He also mentioned in the same email that he already met with a couple of employees. That violated the next paragraph (“The supervisor will provide at least three (3) work days’ notice for scheduling the meeting.”).
I meet with our union tomorrow; my performance review meeting with McDick is supposed to be tomorrow afternoon. I look forward to telling him that I’m not attending the meeting, and why. All aboard the Schadenfreude Express!
You asked me to work on this document, even though it’s an internal document that only the other engineers will read. You want to give me more information on it. So why, pray tell, have you twice scheduled meetings with me when you were already scheduled for other meetings, not shown up, and not sent me an email to let me know you won’t be making it?
Next time you ask for a meeting, I will check your schedule first to make sure you’re not double-booking yourself, and I will reschedule your ass if you have. You have shown a distinct lack of respect for my time, and you get no more chances to do so.
He may be related to that teacher of mine according to whom
- Pareto’s diagram, control diagrams and cause-effect lists are all Ishikawa diagrams, because Ishikawa used them (ok then, I want dibs on calling every continuous probability function I ever used a Nava function; Student and Gauss, up yours)
- when we answer a test question basing our response on what The Book says (Spanish translation of the PMBOK: one of the worst “textbooks” I’ve ever seen, with the addendum of translation mistakes, incoherent translation, and bad typesetting), and The Book happens to be mistranslated, we evidently should know that the sentence is mistranslated.
- but we’re not allowed to point out mismatched translations, such as having a lot of references to “managing” a process in every document, then getting a question in the test where the right answer was the one that talked about “driving”. Ah, we’re supposed to answer literally except when not.
The course isn’t so bad, but the exams blow goats even harder than the PMBOK…
This sounds like the ASQ reference materials and tests, except I’m pretty certain mistranslation would improve them. Grammar is a quality system.