Why don’t they ask you to square the circle as a starter project?
Is your company a monopoly of immense power who can enforce this nonsense on clients?
Have the people responsible for this policy tried to implement it, or do they delegate the job to you? You can leave, or you can relax. It’s not really your problem. Try laughing at the absurdity, or take notes. It might make a great book.
Lots and lots of companies require their partners to implement their solutions at the same day and time. (I used to manage this myself.) Is this something that your company has recently started doing?
Are you managing the integration or is the project manager? It should be either the product manager or the project manager (depending on the company), and you should be a member of the team if we understand your role correctly. I am also uncertain why you would need to attend the scrum meetings. You should be able to just have a standing meeting with the project/product manager. From what you are saying, however, it sounds like you have one title, but are being asked to do both roles. If I have that correctly, get out. Leave. Sign up with the head-hunter. Now. The roles are completely different, and you should never have been asked to do both.
Our product managers do this lobbying work but they expect the business analysts also to do it.
The company has been accused of having terrible “time to market”. Our development time was measured in years, primarily because of what I’ve been describing. So the way they decided to speed things up is to adopt Agile software development. But they failed to address (and refuse to discuss when we bring it up) the issue that as long as we’re doing this long-term lobbying we will never really be agile. They don’t seem to really understand what Agile is, so when they formed the product teams they required all members of the teams to participate in the Agile ceremonies. There are several others like me (but doing different jobs) who aren’t really involved in software development but are still required to do the sprint planning, scrum meetings, story splitting, etc.
Yep, I’ve been searching for other opportunities pretty actively. Every now and then I wonder if this is all normal and I’m just not as professional as I think and will just take a bad attitude with me to the next place. I think even though this discussion sounds like it’s going around in circles, your comments did help me feel that it’s not just me.
I don’t know any head-hunters, so I’ve been working the market by myself. I have reached out to a couple that claimed on their websites that they will evaluate you and help you find a role but they never respond. It seems like the market right now is so intensely competitive that there are no head-hunters like there used to be. (Well, I’m sure they still exist for executive levels.) Now it’s all staffing agencies and contracting houses (along with individual companies).
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Your company sounds remarkably like other companies who fail to correctly understand Agile and what it can and cannot do. (Are you trying to roll marketing into this yet? Global campaigns are really fun!) Without backing from upper management, this will not get fixed. If you have raised the issue, ideally “you” as a team, and it’s been ignored, then leave.
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Put yourself on LinkedIn (if you haven’t) and head-hunters should find you. PM me if you’d like me to review your resume. The other thing I always recommend is that you find some people online with similar job descriptions and look at their resumes. You can often find good inspiration for formatting, what companies are currently looking for, and so on, and then tailor your profile accordingly. LinkedIn will also feed you job openings.
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Are you willing to re-locate? You may not have to, but start thinking about it.
I don’t think any of those roles are really “standardized” these days. I routinely see companies mingling the role of product manager, program/project manager, business analyst, architect, engineer and even SQL coder. Part of the problem IMHO is that these jobs are often performed by contingency workers (whether independent contractors or consultants from Accenture or Cognizant) and to save money, management often doesn’t want to hire every single role they need to complete a project.
Like my current role. After firing the last couple of PMs, the entire team is overworked. Somehow, they think that me coming on is going to take away from their workload. My job is not to take on the work of seven people. It’s to make the work of those seven people more structured and managed. And actually, for awhile I’m actually going to make everyone’s work harder as I have to keep bugging them so I can learn what the heck they are working on.
I recommend a book called “The Culture Code” by Daniel Coyle.
My understanding is that you are trying to herd cats. It sounds like each stakeholder in your business has his own fiefdom and your job is to “lobby” or “campaign” for consensus on what course of action to take next. This sounds terribly dysfunctional and frustrating.
The better way is for the leadership to identify market gaps or opportunities, and then the stakeholders organize to propose solutions themselves. Instead of saying, “We should do X,” to many different stakeholders, you should be assembling them all in a room and saying, “We have the chance to solve X problem, so how do we do it?” It is then the group’s responsibility to debate the problem, propose ideas, discuss feasibility, etc. They take ownership of the problem and devise their own solutions, rather than you trying to convince them to accept a course of action. In this model, your role would be to act as the facilitator for their discussion. You should be making them work for you, rather than serving up ideas for them to accept or reject based on their own whims.
The problem is that this sounds like a very different model for collaboration than the one you have, and creating that organizational culture requires effort from the senior leadership. Since you’ve already decided that you are not interested in the “facilitator” role, I think you’d be better off looking for another job entirely.
I don’t think it’s “just you”, your comments and questions indicate to me that you’re professional (the real idiots just think they’ve nailed it and carry on, oblivious). My question is whether you’ll get “more of the same” at another position, not because of your attitude, but because of the nature of how what you do is done (and maybe numpties up the food chain?). Can you move sideways into something that is less likely to involve so much “cat herding”?
Yes, that’s something I’m considering. One possibility is to move into a role as Scrum Master. In some companies that’s just a BA with some project management tasks thrown in, but in other companies it’s entirely focused on keeping the team organized. Another possibility is product owner - more strategic. Any other ideas of something I should take a look into?
I should point out that I’m okay with cat herding as long as it’s not more than about a dozen cats. In this current place it’s around a hundred when you count both internal and external kitties!
So, a career in rugby football? That’s nice 
I’ve obviously no clue whatsoever as to what you do It’s a shame there aren’t headhunters any more. They had an “in” with all of the firms and could “sell you” even when there wasn’t an actual job going.
well, getting that number of “cats” together would clearly be frustrating to try to wrangle. crikey. The more detail you post, the more I’m thinking it’s “not just you”.
I think this is more of an internal to you problem than a problem with the job responsibilities and tasks. You feel overwhelmed, however, you get all your work complete, on time, to the satisfaction of your supervisor, without working any overtime.
You’re not a physical therapist trying to do brain surgery. A PT trying to do BS is going to kill every single person they treat. You, OTOH are satisfactorily handling your duties. You are able to do this job successfully, you ARE doing this job successfully, you also happen to be experiencing anxiety over your abilities to handle it.
That’s not to say that your company is well run, only that your feelings of being overwhelmed don’t seem to be a result of their inefficiency. You’re not a coder working 16 hour days for 2 weeks to meet an impossible deadline, you get all your work done with no overtime.
Perhaps the work isn’t the right work for you, at least in this company. If you dread the work you’re assigned, that’s going to cause anxiety, even if you can accomplish it. There is obviously some uncertainty in the work, relying on others to approve ideas, that may be something your personality conflicts with. You might just need some of msmith’s ideas above with adding more structure to your tasks so they don’t feel quite as much like a morass, but are more step by step
I’d be willing to bet it’s not defined that way at all, but has sort of turned into that sort of job over time.
My last job was a lot like what she describes- the issue for me wasn’t that I was getting bad reviews, or working a lot of overtime, it’s that I constantly felt like I was behind the eight-ball and everything I did was by the skin of my teeth, and not nearly as considered and polished as I’d have preferred. I was getting it done, but it never felt any sort of confidence because the way we were organized, there wasn’t any coordination or ability to really budget time or plan ahead- it was always putting out support fires, and then scrambling to meet other project type deadlines that didn’t move because of the support fires.
You can’t really work in a panicked, barely getting stuff done type environment in the long term- it’s really stressful, even if it doesn’t really have the classic stressful job trappings like 16 hour day crunch times.
And I know I’m good at what I do; it wasn’t a matter of confidence or anything like that. I ended up getting a pretty good job title bump and an 18% raise when I switched jobs about 5 months back, and am doing well where I’m at now, or so they tell me.
It seems to me like the OP might get some of the cats in the corral in the corner, but there’s a chance any one of them might make a “break for it” at any time, or it’s like constructing a house of cards, you get a few levels up but anything could topple the lot. I’m feeling a bit anxious just thinking about functioning in the sort of environment you guys are describing. It wouldn’t be for me.
Understood, but that is the environment where I and people like me flourish. As I said above, it ain’t for everyone but it is a necessary skill set in the modern corporate world.
To clarify - the vast majority of projects should be planned and implemented via solid methodology, but there will always be those that pop up as fires and must be solved quickly and outside the normal paths. That’s where I live, and I love it.
Some of the “get shit done ASAP” stuff is fun as a break in the routine, but a steady diet isn’t, at least not for me.
That was the problem- it was *constant * support firefighting and playing catch-up as the status quo, and then to make it worse, there were the usual exec-caused hair-on-fire projects and demands that added to the chaos and stress.
Not a year before, it was mostly steady, planned work, with occasional chaotic flareups, and a manager who understood what was going on. Then we got bought by some assholes out of rural Pennsylvania, and everything went to shit. My good boss left, the new ones were idiots, and they proceeded to put the screws to everyone about anything pleasant like working from home or having flexible hours, and then proceeded to put the spurs to all the projects at the same time.
That’s a great description of what I’m dealing with, and it’s really not for me, either.
Perfect example happened yesterday. We have an implementation in a couple weeks that all customers agreed to months ago. Suddenly yesterday one major player advised us on a conference call that they would not be able to do it. We checked their written response to our industry notification and this was their reason for pulling out:
“We were planning to implement this without doing any development work, but now realize that we have to do development for it. This is too short-notice so we need you to postpone the implementation until Q1 next year.”
In other words, despite us being very clear with everyone from day one that this would require development, they assumed they could skip it. Now that they realize they can’t avoid it they’re blaming US for short notice! Guess how many names I’m calling them right now in my head?
Here’s where I display my ignorance again, and ask you whether this sort of thing that can be “dealt with” in advance by checking with each of the parties as to what “development” plans they have put in place and whether it’s all “good to go”.
Look, this is pretty much all I do in the OPs position:
-Be “impressive”. Yes, originally I show up as the “hot shot Manhattan management consultant” wearing the $1000 monogrammed Tiffany cufflinks. But honestly, I’m just as impressive when my son replaces my cufflinks with his toys and I make cufflinks out of the 3M alligator clips from the supply closet.
-Be likeable. I don’t know why, but for some odd reason these idiots I work for like me.
-Don’t say “no” to anything. You aren’t saying “yes”, but you never say you can’t do something.
-Find people to delegate stuff to. You can’t do everything. But if you can get other people to do stuff, that’s “leadership”!
-Just whittle away at getting stuff done. Like with my client. I can’t “unfuck” in two weeks what they spent months fucking up. But as long as progress is made and I appear to be doing stuff, people seem happy.
There is a lot of merit in realizing that you can and should only take a single day’s chunk out of the backlog, and that you’re not necessarily responsible for the whole thing.
It’s all relative, in that I’m doing the same crap, at about the same motivation level in my new job, and I’m somehow some kind of bad-ass now, when at my old job, they just seemed to take that level of performance for granted. That’s really the crux- that sort of environment tends to require some level of positive affirmation and praise for trying to conquer it, and not giving that tends to burn people out really fast and make them feel very underappreciated.
We do that. Once a month conference calls where each client is asked if they’ll be ready for the implementation. This particular one answered in the affirmative every month until now.
To be fair, I don’t deal with these things alone, the management team also handles them. But it’s still an environment where I see constant pressure to “be Agiile” while at the same time we have this kind of “adverse” business pressure that prevents us from being Agile. The result is a lot of conflict, a multi-year development cycle, and constant juggling of things that should have been completed a long time ago with new things. Two steps back, one step forward kind of feeling.
I understand how frustrating this is, but how is it your problem?
It’s very honorable that you want to do a good job. The customer effed up. Therefore, either management decides to postpone, or to go ahead with the implementation anyway. You did everything you could/should.
If no one is blaming you, there is no percentage in you blaming yourself. If there is nothing you can do, there is nothing you need to do. Stressing about it doesn’t help.
Regards,
Shodan