It’s also sometimes a necessary tactic to cover your team’s ass. Very often, the people holding things up will blame another group on the project. Getting everyone on the same call so the bullshit can be called out in front of everyone can be necessary to protect your team’s reputation.
Holdups: “Well, we can’t start testing until Infrastructure builds our servers!”
Infrastructure: "You asked for a 3TB server. The largest in our environment is 1TB, and it handles [heavier thing than this]. Two weeks ago we suggested a smaller size to begin with and that we would increase it as need was demonstrated, asking for your confirmation before we continued. We also asked [group owning the vendor relationship] to see if we could schedule a chat with a technical resource at the vendor to help us better understand the need for something so far outside our standards.
We’ve not seen a response regarding our suggestion. Can you confirm that our suggested solution is acceptable during this meeting, or do you need to confer with other people in your department?"
Happens all the fucking time. Instead of admitting that the timeline isn’t possible, or rightfully blaming the vendor for absurd requirements (no, we aren’t giving you fucking domain admin), teams will just play pass the blame all the way to whatever department owns the deepest part of the tech stack or access management.
The easiest way to push back is to state how unambiguously bad their request was, and that they’ve not replied to you, in front of everyone. If you’re lucky, all that takes is an email. If it’s a project involving people who think they’re too important to read email, then you need the call/meeting. Unfortunately those “too important” people are also the ones who have the biggest sway on the business.
It’s stupid, but as long as people are involved in business, there will be people problems to solve. Those often don’t work in the realm of “most efficient” or “most sensible”.
Whatever your level of digust at it is, the soomer you learn to start looking at the “business politics” side of things the better you’ll do.
This is also what good project managers are for. Unfortunately those are rare.
Yeah, my wife is a PM and a majority of her meetings are CYA. It’s great when a department says, “we have no idea what you’re talking about,” and she can show them the video of them agreeing or confirming that this.
A lot of them are also just to get an answer to a yes or no question when the entire department is ignoring the question in both email and chat.
The best part is that she’s only trying to meet their own ridiculous deadline.
the overlap between good documentation and covering your ass well is just a circle, and I love it
both because it gets my team to document stuff, and it means I can point to the CYA trail when somebody comes to me huffing and puffing about something they think I was supposed to handle
In project management it’s pretty common to just invite everyone to your meeting because you have NFI what’s going on or who is doing what and without meetings your toolbox is empty.
A good compromise for this is to have the project manager send out the agenda a day before the meeting so they can call out who needs to attend, and anyone that isn’t needed can skip it.
Oh my god. Spend time making shit clear and concise, send the email to the manager. No response. Multiple other teams already responded to the initial email and moving smoothly.
Send a short follow up a week later with the rest of the team cc’d. Manager responds to the initial email, dropping the “hey fuckface, do your job” email from the chain.
“Please schedule a meeting with my team to discuss.” (Literal words. Nothing the fuck else.)
(Putting the dropped email and the full team back in) “According to calendars, your team is not available as a full group for two weeks. Given the tight deadline on this, if you or your team have any specific questions, I’d be happy to discuss over email.”
Nothing for two weeks, in the meeting it’s clear that none of them even attempted to read any of it.
It gets better. Both in the “PTSD” and they got what’s coming to them sense. Some additional context: This was a switchover from one system to another.
They agreed to a specific special solution that my team would set up for them, different from our standard switchover for everyone else. We just needed some incredibly basic info from them that any member of that team should have been able to provide in 30 seconds.
They got the info to us two days before the deadline.
So, some stuff happened and while we had everything switched over to the new system, we didn’t actually shut down the old system for a few more weeks past the deadline we had shared. Before we shut it down I did a final scan and notified any person/team that still appeared to be using it. These problem children were, because of course they would.
Sent them the “Hey guys, you didn’t turn off your old shit pointing to the old system when you were supposed to. You’ll need to find an alternate solution now” email on a Monday. One member of their team puts in a ticket about something only tangentially related, but definitely caused by the old system shutdown, not working on Wednesday. It doesn’t reach me personally due to lack of any useful details, instead just sitting in my team’s generic queue.
That Friday, 30 fucking minutes before we close for the week, I get a response from the next manager up the chain from the one that played games with this shit earlier. Clearly the shitty manager is trying to play politics now by bringing in his own manager, who hadn’t been in the chain. “Thanks for letting us know, we’ve been trying to troubleshoot this all week! How do we resolve this?”
So, their team ignored my email. Still didn’t understand anything from any of the previous emails in the chain or else they wouldn’t have had anything to waste time failing to troubleshoot. You tried to send data to a system/server that no longer exists. Then this power play right before closing in what I think was an attempt to be able to blame me for being a week behind on something.
“You would need to follow the instructions I’ve attached from my first email about this sent to [shitty manager] on [over a month ago]. Please let me know if you jave any questions!”
In project management it’s pretty common for meetings to be held because the people needing to get shit done aren’t and are ignoring emails.
Collective punishment is against the Geneva Convention.
So are chemical weapons, but police tear gas people all the time.
The geneva convention applies to foreigners in a war not your own population i think
We haven’t really been doing great about adhering to that lately.
It’s also sometimes a necessary tactic to cover your team’s ass. Very often, the people holding things up will blame another group on the project. Getting everyone on the same call so the bullshit can be called out in front of everyone can be necessary to protect your team’s reputation.
Holdups: “Well, we can’t start testing until Infrastructure builds our servers!”
Infrastructure: "You asked for a 3TB server. The largest in our environment is 1TB, and it handles [heavier thing than this]. Two weeks ago we suggested a smaller size to begin with and that we would increase it as need was demonstrated, asking for your confirmation before we continued. We also asked [group owning the vendor relationship] to see if we could schedule a chat with a technical resource at the vendor to help us better understand the need for something so far outside our standards.
We’ve not seen a response regarding our suggestion. Can you confirm that our suggested solution is acceptable during this meeting, or do you need to confer with other people in your department?"
Happens all the fucking time. Instead of admitting that the timeline isn’t possible, or rightfully blaming the vendor for absurd requirements (no, we aren’t giving you fucking domain admin), teams will just play pass the blame all the way to whatever department owns the deepest part of the tech stack or access management.
The easiest way to push back is to state how unambiguously bad their request was, and that they’ve not replied to you, in front of everyone. If you’re lucky, all that takes is an email. If it’s a project involving people who think they’re too important to read email, then you need the call/meeting. Unfortunately those “too important” people are also the ones who have the biggest sway on the business.
It’s stupid, but as long as people are involved in business, there will be people problems to solve. Those often don’t work in the realm of “most efficient” or “most sensible”.
Whatever your level of digust at it is, the soomer you learn to start looking at the “business politics” side of things the better you’ll do.
This is also what good project managers are for. Unfortunately those are rare.
Yeah, my wife is a PM and a majority of her meetings are CYA. It’s great when a department says, “we have no idea what you’re talking about,” and she can show them the video of them agreeing or confirming that this.
A lot of them are also just to get an answer to a yes or no question when the entire department is ignoring the question in both email and chat.
The best part is that she’s only trying to meet their own ridiculous deadline.
the overlap between good documentation and covering your ass well is just a circle, and I love it
both because it gets my team to document stuff, and it means I can point to the CYA trail when somebody comes to me huffing and puffing about something they think I was supposed to handle
Some teams you have to schedule a meeting for them to work. Like, yeah, you could do this shit on your own time…but you aren’t
In project management it’s pretty common to just invite everyone to your meeting because you have NFI what’s going on or who is doing what and without meetings your toolbox is empty.
A good compromise for this is to have the project manager send out the agenda a day before the meeting so they can call out who needs to attend, and anyone that isn’t needed can skip it.
That’s only if people read the info in the actual email.
“-Could you just explain what this meeting is about”
“-Did you actually read the email summary”
“-yes but it’d be better if you explain it again”
No you didn’t…
Oh my god. Spend time making shit clear and concise, send the email to the manager. No response. Multiple other teams already responded to the initial email and moving smoothly.
Send a short follow up a week later with the rest of the team cc’d. Manager responds to the initial email, dropping the “hey fuckface, do your job” email from the chain.
“Please schedule a meeting with my team to discuss.” (Literal words. Nothing the fuck else.)
(Putting the dropped email and the full team back in) “According to calendars, your team is not available as a full group for two weeks. Given the tight deadline on this, if you or your team have any specific questions, I’d be happy to discuss over email.”
Nothing for two weeks, in the meeting it’s clear that none of them even attempted to read any of it.
PTSD intensifies…
It gets better. Both in the “PTSD” and they got what’s coming to them sense. Some additional context: This was a switchover from one system to another.
They agreed to a specific special solution that my team would set up for them, different from our standard switchover for everyone else. We just needed some incredibly basic info from them that any member of that team should have been able to provide in 30 seconds.
They got the info to us two days before the deadline.
So, some stuff happened and while we had everything switched over to the new system, we didn’t actually shut down the old system for a few more weeks past the deadline we had shared. Before we shut it down I did a final scan and notified any person/team that still appeared to be using it. These problem children were, because of course they would.
Sent them the “Hey guys, you didn’t turn off your old shit pointing to the old system when you were supposed to. You’ll need to find an alternate solution now” email on a Monday. One member of their team puts in a ticket about something only tangentially related, but definitely caused by the old system shutdown, not working on Wednesday. It doesn’t reach me personally due to lack of any useful details, instead just sitting in my team’s generic queue.
That Friday, 30 fucking minutes before we close for the week, I get a response from the next manager up the chain from the one that played games with this shit earlier. Clearly the shitty manager is trying to play politics now by bringing in his own manager, who hadn’t been in the chain. “Thanks for letting us know, we’ve been trying to troubleshoot this all week! How do we resolve this?”
So, their team ignored my email. Still didn’t understand anything from any of the previous emails in the chain or else they wouldn’t have had anything to waste time failing to troubleshoot. You tried to send data to a system/server that no longer exists. Then this power play right before closing in what I think was an attempt to be able to blame me for being a week behind on something.
“You would need to follow the instructions I’ve attached from my first email about this sent to [shitty manager] on [over a month ago]. Please let me know if you jave any questions!”
Last I heard from them. Hooray!
what about the people that get shit dont and ignore emails
They’re not getting all of their shit done since responding to emails is part of the shit they’re supposed to be doing.