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I wish I'd stumbled across this thread years ago as I could have provided all kinds of stories of corporate stupidity but my brain is now fried from dealing with it so all I can remember right now is that a project with a regulatory deadline has been so comprehensively hosed up by the people running it that it's unreal, but don't worry everyone, we're now "shifting from trying to deliver 100% to a priority based approach"! That's an excuse I'm going to have to remember in future. The one upside is that despite this causing me to have a stress induced meltdown after about 20 hours of calls dealing with this poo poo in one week and go on a rambling rant to my manager that might have included me saying "I should probably just quit", it has finally meant that it's been realised that maybe, just maybe, having only one single person in the entire company that understands (and in fact wrote) most of one of our key systems because we've been " in a hiring freeze" every year for ever is not a good way to ensure that we can deal with "unexpected" issues like "we used people so dumb they didn't even know that the questions they were asking were wrong and now the entire project has to be redesigned from scratch 3 months before it's due".
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Mar 31, 2021 23:33
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 23:58 |
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A roving group of project managers asked about paying a consultancy to "set up a process to manage a work flow" and the solution they were touting solved about 30% of the problem, had a reliance on a piece of software that had nothing to do with the way the process worked and has an expensive license model (solution: "just use one pc and they can all remote into it") and their rationale was "this way we don't need to pay for IT resources!". My response was "this is not going to do what you think it does and who the hell is going to support it? We could just build this ourselves for less money if we'd just hire some decent people", the team that support the software said "this is not what it's for, this doesn't make any sense". So of course, they signed the contract anyway and I get a mail saying "OK can we have a meeting to establish who will provision all the sql servers and accounts? The consultants start next week. Also please provide an IT point of contact for the project to assist them throughout.". Get hosed. The name of the PM group is the "process transformation" project 
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Apr 7, 2021 16:16
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They got forced out of a "change department" for being useless because it turns out that by themselves, a bunch of PMs can't actually do anything of any tangible value. But instead of them getting fired they somehow formed their own splinter group and now sneak around the place, whispering false promises into the ears of other departments then running away before the poo poo hits the fan or, more likely, saying "that's an implementation problem" and hand waving it away, then it's on to the next one! FAUXTON posted:A creep Accurate. Or maybe an "underestimate". Powerful Two-Hander fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Apr 7, 2021 |
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Apr 7, 2021 21:00
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An excess of project managers
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Apr 8, 2021 00:02
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priznat posted:An opinion of engineers At the moment I have a daily half hour call, a three times a week "mandatory catch up", two sets of appointments added as "reminders to submit status updates", multiple hour plus calls during the week and a once weekly "management summary" call all on the same project and typically, only half an hour of any of it is of any use but if I dare to not attend them I start getting chased on three different platforms simultaneously about why I'm not there.
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Apr 8, 2021 10:27
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Inner Light posted:That's honestly pretty light for meeting load. About right for what percentage of it has any value. Oh that's just for one project. I'd say in a given day I probably have 6 hours of meetings scheduled  The roving PM group I mentioned scheduled a call about their "we signed away a bunch of money to consultants without knowing what we were doing" project and admitted that they didn't actually know what they've paid for and "assumed that it didn't need any IT support" but "we talked with the CTO on this!", so I asked the CTO and he said "nooooo this does not sound like what was talked about I agree this looks like a clusterfuck" so this is going v.well. Also, "can we avoid setting up a sql server if we use an access database instead?".
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Apr 10, 2021 11:02
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Fil5000 posted:Today I have left corporate and moved into central government. I have just collected my laptop and seen that I have 73 emails. I started this job 55 minutes ago. Tfw you have to define your outlook filter rules for the first time in years.
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Apr 12, 2021 21:22
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Sundae posted:Today, our CEO sent out an e-mail thanking everyone for their hard work and here, have another paid vacation day plus another relaxing-work day. The most recent one we got was "thank you for all the hard work but oops our other region completely hosed up and just lost loads of money so consider this the ground work for me loving all your end of year pay over, thanks! Keep it up! " CEO emails are probably the second biggest eye roll after head of HR emails telling me that "we understand remote working can be difficult so please ensure you take breaks during the day" which is just loving laughable when we keep adding more and more "senior management initiatives" that require another 5 steering group meetings a week. Edit: "this is a 3 month sprint to kick start the alignment between areas in the data strategy, the consultant team will be in touch with you and we are conscious of your time and that you have day jobs" *immediately fills every 30min gap in my calendar for the rest of the week with calls*
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Apr 13, 2021 09:22
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Tnuctip posted:Surprised no one has said it yet, as a recent again project manager Ahem: Powerful Two-Hander posted:Accurate. Or maybe an "underestimate". To be fair I wouldn't expect a PM to read the previous notes either.
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Apr 13, 2021 21:54
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Our useless support desk would take so long to pick up if you got an account lockout that they added a tool to remote unlock your account.... Using another password you had to remember! Now I think it let's you set "security questions" to unlock which is about as secure as you would imagine.
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Apr 14, 2021 15:33
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Eric the Mauve posted:If you're going to work for a large company your sanity requires that you make your peace early in your career with the fact that to your boss's boss you're nothing more than a faceless interchangeable cog in the machine, and no one above that level is even aware you exist. Having a strong need for personal validation is going to give you a real bad time in the corporate environment. Weeellll you say that but I get on well with my bosses boss and I'm pretty sure his boss know who I am as well, though this is in part because we used to be a lot smaller and I sat right near him for ages. Also not an American Corp which helps. Now whether there's any benefit from this I'm less sure on.
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Apr 30, 2021 20:02
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Midjack posted:https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/02/roll-safe-the-guy-tapping-head-meme-explained.html I honestly thought that picture was from an 80s/90s film and I realise now I based that solely on the watch he's got on. I never even saw the BBC 3 ident in the top left!
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May 1, 2021 11:13
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"hello Powerful Two-Hander's reportee, we know there are some resource problems but as the support team we are handling 80% of support requests and we need a plan to be able to escalate them to you please advise." Hmm where to start. The "resource problems" are that all of our onshore devs left so we have zero devs, and as the support team, a complaint of "we are handling too much support and can't be bothered to do it" isn't really going to fly. Nice "copy the person's manager" attempt though, unfortunately for you I am a terrible manager in all respects bar one: I know that the guy you're getting at is really good and if there is a genuine problem he'd have fixed it.
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May 10, 2021 20:45
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remigious posted:How the gently caress does someone become a Project Manager II and be so completely inept at sticking to deadlines?? Because the point isn't to meet the deadline it's to produce hundreds of hours worth of planning meetings about the deadline, then blame someone else for it not being hit.
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May 12, 2021 23:55
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We have so many PM groups it's completely insane. And all of them do the "ok we have this project please provide the resource estimates" so you do and then they go "ok when are they starting?" and it's like, idk hiring takes a few months if we're allowed to hire and if we get candidates through and if I have time to interview them and seeing as we have none of these things my answer is "no idea". Then I get "but this project has buuddgeeet I don't understaaand" and I just assume they work for a different company because budget != able to hire. Meanwhile, they've hired another 3 PMs who are producing status updates and plans for things that there's nobody to implement. My manager described the whole thing as vaporware lol.
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May 14, 2021 13:26
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evil_bunnY posted:Your answer should be "at this rate, never" Ha, good point. One of them even did this after hiring a bunch of consultants that then came round with "ok, we appreciate you are busy but....." trying to eat up hours of time to tell them how to write the project for them because of course being external, they had zero idea how anything currently worked. Funnily enough, if the SMEs are all over allocated, adding another project that relies on them is not going to result in that project doing anything!
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May 14, 2021 23:43
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, not "no idea"
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evil_bunnY posted:This is the situation on one of my projects RN (except I saw that fucker coming and told the head of unit "I need those two guys full time until this thing is done" and they said yes), and it clearly exposes management figures with zero clue about the actual business. It does. Unfortunately they're all in a separate project group so we can't boot them out and clear space for some people that actually do things, as opposed to talking about how someone else should do things.
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May 16, 2021 15:46
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Yawgmoth posted:This too. She is eating up my precious non-interrupted work time to talk about the work that I would be getting done if she'd stop scheduling loving meetings. We don't need a "15 minute" (35 because she loves to hear her own voice) meeting for each of us to say "see that poo poo in the basket with my name on it? That's what I'm doing today." every drat day. We also don't need a weekly "30 minute" (45-60 because see above) meeting for the whole office to do the same goddamn thing. And then she whines to me about how she's so behind on a bunch of poo poo, followed by laughing at my response of "I know one amazing trick to finding an extra 4 hours a week to do things". I have seen one guy add in daily 15 minute calls, two weekly reminders to update PowerPoint statuses, three reminders requesting updates be sent to him via email (two of which were Friday and Monday, funny how there wasn't much happening there!) and an hour long "status update". I ignored all of this except for the status update because that's the one management were actually on and so was the only one worth any time because guess what? Nobody reads a single status update powerpoint they are sent in any detail.
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May 16, 2021 18:55
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Democratic Pirate posted:Starting to get emails saying, in corporate speak, “please god everyone go use some vacation time.” I’m assuming accounting got through to the higher ups about the accrued expense hanging out in that account. I can feel the frustration from our US teams as us filthy eurotrash all simultaneously take up all the accrued leave we had this year at the same time just to get down to the acceptable level of carryover we've been allowed, loving over their "we assumed all resources are available and fungible" project plans and then start a new holiday calender with 35+ days in the bank in a month.
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May 26, 2021 21:11
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There was a fairly major "near miss" gently caress up that traces a line back to "we can't do it properly that's complicated, just do the bare minimum and we'll do the rest manually" decisions made up to 10+ years ago and that happened to coincide with a much, much, bigger gently caress up in a related area and wow funny how "we don't have time or money to 'gold plate' this, just do it all manually" is suddenly an unacceptable approach and everybody wants a "proper fix" ! Bonus: the first suggested "fix" was to manually reconcile two data sets that are not only only different because one of them is manually created with no reference to the other, but the other one is known to be poorly maintained and neither is actually of relevance to the problem in the first place. So the suggested solution which would have been signed off by the risk people, would not have actually done anything. Perfect. Volmarias posted:There are now Look if I can't even reliably remember where documents I've written myself are, how on earth is anybody else going to find them?
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Jun 4, 2021 23:26
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Our "let's have two CTOs!" experiment has ended as predicted: existing CTO is "retiring", so far so predictable. Except the pointless "split all of IT into two divisions so they can have one each" is still going ahead but it's so unclear why it's happening that the email explaining it relegated the difference to "these two things are in different paragraphs". Also during this "split" a couple of entire departments seem to have vanished off the org chart so now nobody knows who is running them.
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Jun 9, 2021 21:07
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Eric the Mauve posted:What's the structure? What's the basis of separation of the two divisions? I'd be inclined to suspect a significant layoff is still looming and decisions are still being made as to which departments to keep and which to shut down. There's no discernible logic to it but loosely it's "everything that supports main business division X" and "everything else". The problem is, that "everything else" also supports the main business division, and many parts of both sides are 100% reliant on applications in the other. So all it's doing is creating an artificial barrier. It's all been worded so vaguely though that I wouldn't be surprised if it all quietly reverts back in a few months. One point someone made though was "great, now we have twice the management" so maybe you're right! Edit: i mean the real reason was to try and somehow replace the CTO without replacing the CTO but seeing as he saw the writing on the wall and left that's kind of redundant (lol) now.
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Jun 9, 2021 22:53
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I don't know why but that reminds me of the time years back when there was a mail sent about a "mandatory consultation" aka redundancy round and someone replied all with "can we use this as an opportunity to cut dead wood"? Yes we can, and thank you for volunteering!
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Jun 10, 2021 14:15
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Our hybrid model is apparently that you'd be in the office 3 days a week but it can't be the same 3 days every week and you can't have the same people in at the same time every time. Immediately someone said "well how am I supposed to plan childcare if I don't know when I'm going to be at home?" and the backtrack of "oh well of course there will be special cases" begins.
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Jun 13, 2021 09:39
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evil_bunnY posted:
"we need 24x5 coverage in all regions!" "ok well we have nobody in the US and the Japan team are short so we need two full time staff in the high cost areas and an extra half to manage them" ".... nevermind we'll just make India work late"
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Jun 13, 2021 13:13
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Just had a two hour training session on "hybrid working planning and how to manage a hybrid team" and the only thing everyone agreed on was that this should have been done a year ago and that nobody knew what the corporate plan was,when it was happening or understood the "rules" it was based on. Return to office is off to a good start!
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Jun 15, 2021 13:53
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I've been trying to get a waste of time meeting cancelled because this project is not gonna be saved by another hour long 'requirements meeting' and when I pointed out it was also at 6am for three of the people on it (not me) and could all be done via email the guy that set it up said 'well I have too many emails,I prefer meetings and I don't mind getting up at 6' I mean ok if you want to ruin your life fine but why do that to everyone else?
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Jun 15, 2021 20:45
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Thanatosian posted:Reschedule it for 4:00pm for the people for whom that would be 6am, and tell the guy you don't mind staying late. gently caress that, I've already spent enough time working late on this disaster zone. Instead I told both the other people in the 6am zone that I tried to get it cancelled but what can you do? They're already fed up with the whole project and think their time is being wasted and this isn't gonna help but I tried!
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Jun 15, 2021 20:59
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:gently caress that, I've already spent enough time working late on this disaster zone. Lol everyone is well and truly pissed off about this now, each further meeting on the subject of this project makes it worse and worse because they without fail end up with the PMs saying 'but what are the dates' over and over and over.
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Jun 16, 2021 21:09
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Sundae posted:
Captain America 'i got that reference'.gif
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Jun 17, 2021 00:10
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Dobbs_Head posted:We use box for our shared drive, and it’s actually kinda nice. Search is pretty solid through a web-browser and the integration with windows through their box drive app is solid. The key to successful doc management is to never let people create their own folders at the root. Manage that poo poo via permissions because otherwise it's a total mess approx. 5 minutes after you turn it on and some creates a folder called 'work' at the root. Same for Box. We're looking at 3 doc and email management systems at the moment and one uses SharePoint as the back end which is gonna rule itself out because nobody wants to be responsible for our SharePoint instance and it's a total disaster zone
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Jun 19, 2021 14:04
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Howard Phillips posted:Is Sharepoint the greatest scam Microsoft pulled off? Seems like no organization uses it for all the features paid for in an enterprise license. I have actually seen some pretty clever stuff built with sharepoint but I've never seen any of it actually used. I think it's because unless you go full bore into it and hire a load of people to manage it and configure it, you end up with a mess and doing that is expensive so it just gets turned over to end users to do what they want and well,here we are! It's probably better on o365.
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Jun 20, 2021 10:36
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A software vendor has been intermittently sending emails requesting that I set up a meeting with them to 'complete the onboarding process for team xyz', except I have no idea what that process is, none of the people involved want to tell me what this process is and the users don't seem to understand it either. The worst thing though is that their 'account success manager' keeps sending me emails saying 'I am very busy so please set up a meeting as per my calendar', still without any info on what this is about, and is now getting someone else to send emails on her behalf saying 'she is very busy, can you arrange a meeting this week?'. No you fuckers, sort it out yourselves with the team that are apparently paying for whatever this is (and who have not sent a single response that I can see) don't drag me into it without any context and then ask me to be your secretary.
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Jun 23, 2021 00:20
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Trabant posted:That sounds like a weird sales strategy. She gets you on the phone and goes "Oh, you're not in charge of team xyz? So sorry for the confusion, I'll have my team update our contact list. But since I have you on the phone, let me tell you about our crappy product..." It's weird because we already use the thing in a bunch of other teams and there's no reason why this one is different, and the general support guys I've spoken to are all pretty good. The combination of 'I'm not going to tell you what the problem is because I implicitly don't think you'd understand it' and 'I am very busy because my time is important so I expect you to arrange this for me'' from this "customer success rep" or whatever they are has pissed me right off though.. Democratic Pirate posted:I was just going to ask a general question about the “who schedules the meeting” game because yeah it sucks. Agreed. What's more mystifying here is that we seem to have paid for whatever this is and yet the people who spent the money haven't got their act together to sort this out either.
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Jun 23, 2021 08:54
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Volmarias posted:This feels like some kind of PUA approach to sales. Oh poo poo you're right I'm getting negged by our vendors
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Jun 24, 2021 18:55
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'What do you mean there may be contention for SMEs? I thought resources were ring fenced' come on man what planet/company are you from?
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Jun 25, 2021 00:03
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Tibalt posted:I considered that, but I'm pretty sure the actual motivation was the auditor going "Wait, Tibalt is the person for this as well??" during our pre-IPO audit. This would make sense because the first response is always "ok we'll hire more people" which management will immediately shoot down because we can't hire people what are you crazy? So something gets done and everyone pretends the problem is solved. I think I was an audit point at one time and I can't remember what we did about that.. hired a grad I think which hasn't really solved the problem. When it comes up I say "well, if anyone would actually read any of the documentation I write maybe it wouldn't be so bad" but I'll freely admit that even with that you'd be hopeless from a cold start.
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Jun 29, 2021 22:46
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priznat posted:One thing that is funny to me is it seems like the more senior you get the shorter and more perfunctory interviews get, at least in engineering. Talk about projects a bit, show you aren’t a complete social failure, don’t have to do any tests or that BS, and then get offer. Goes from a day long affair to a couple hours at most. I once went for "a chat about a role" which was maybe 15 minutes with one guy and 30 with another and then got offered a job paying 25% more than my current one. I thought I was just going to find out what they were doing/ looking for and wasn't really looking for a new job! I declined because everyone that had worked there said it was a disaster zone, probably should have more aggressively worked the angle to get paid more at my current job though.
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Jul 15, 2021 14:54
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FrozenVent posted:Has anyone ever seen change management done right? Does the concept even exist?
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Oct 7, 2021 21:52
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 23:58 |
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I did have a good change management guy assigned to me but he left and his replacement just bombards me with status meetings when we've done literally nothing since the last one and the project is basically stuck in low gear anyway. I think he's got the approach of "if I have all the artefacts and all the meetings, the project must be going well". The first guy was good because he'd go "well I've got other poo poo to do anyway" and to be fair he made much nicer powerpoint slides than I did. E: this is like a change management project function, not one of the other two or three meanings.
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Oct 8, 2021 00:03
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