just another frantic sunday

Yesterday I got back into the customer office after being gone for a week. I had given everyone on the team explicit instructions on what to do while I was gone. I told them to contact me if they had any questions or ran out of work. Every evening when I checked in with them, things were going fine. I even came by here on Tuesday to drop off the latest version of the software we’re using, and they were supposed to do an upgrade, which takes about 30 minutes.

I was here a hour early to catch up before the rest of the team came. But I couldn’t get to my notebook or papers that I needed because security decided while I was gone that everyone needed to start storing their stuff in a locked cabinet. So my things were put in a cabinet for which no one could find the key. They didn’t get my things unlocked until noon.

Which in the end didn’t matter because I got pulled into a meeting right after I arrived to deal with a major issue that came up at the steering committee that no one in my company who attended the meeting bothered to warn me about. I had to put together a bunch of documents to show that a guy who is trying to throw my company under the bus saying we aren’t doing things was lying. It also turned out some things didn’t get done, even though my team had told me they were completed. It appears they spent the week I was gone screwing around, so now I am having to reshuffle tasks because the software upgrade isn’t done. Of course I’m responsible because I’m leading this project, but I am more than annoyed that my team lied to me about their progress.

So instead of doing my real work, I’ve been trying to get everything else done so we can close some action items. My team keeps disappearing when I try to delegate things to them. They’ve wasted two days now upgrading and adding access controls to our server. That task should literally take 2 hours at most. My customer is screaming at me because it isn’t done. The whole team is hanging out in the server room doing god knows what while I’m shuffling from fire to fire here and meeting to meeting.

Just when it seems things can’t get any worse, today in an organizational chart review meeting, which should have taken 5 minutes, the COO decided to reorganize all the departments and change their names. So now there is a bunch of unplanned rework for that. I’m gone the next three days to do training and if my team continues to screw around we are going to be behind schedule. And the training is supposed to be for only 10 people per session (I’m doing 3 sessions in the next three weeks) they’ve brought in people from a sister company that want to be trained as well. So it’s just me trying to train 15 people per session who have the attention span of 5 seconds and who speak English usually as a third language and who don’t have any real technical skills.

Which is not the only scope creep we’re having. The customer keeps asking for more and more stuff, and the “project manager” tells me she’ll say no to it, and then gets into meetings and agrees to everything. Then she doesn’t even bother to tell me what she’s agreed to so I get blindsided when the customer says “why isn’t this done? [the project manager] said you would have this finished today”. Fine, I adjust to change. But the project manager also keeps randomly pulling my resources so they can do things like have a day off because they’re exhausted from working a few hours of overtime. Which I might feel bad about if they were working even half the hours they said they were working.

And if one more person here says “relax and enjoy life” I will scream.