I think I’m beginning to grok wug
Friday, March 18, 2005
Having cheerfully lexifabbed this exciting and useful new word at the start of the week, I now perceive that it has greater dimensions than I had originally conceived. After a week of learning what it is that a project management job actually involves, culminating in an essential but extremely distressing confrontation yesterday, I now have a fond new appreciation for the condition of wug. I am, definitively, pretty bloody wug today.
Since I’ve been back at work, I’ve been running myself ragged recruiting key technical staff to do the actual work of Project Porkpie. Of a necessity this has involved a certain amount of involvement from our contracts experts. Understand that it is only with the greatest trepidation that one interacts with our pool of contract specialists, for they are an obstinate species; methodical, pedantic and utterly inflexible in all circumstances. The almost religious fervour with which they pursue their passion for ruthless adherence to Process (capitalised to indicate the stone in which it is set) is frightening and strange, and numerous are their victims, shredded by red tape and drained of all light and hope. One beards the Contract Lion’s den armed with all of the work already done, or not at all.
The problem I have increasingly be facing as this fortnight has worn on is that my particular provider of contracting “advice and assistance” in this instance did not appear to give a fuck about actually getting anything done. That’s not their problem, you see.
I, however, am charged with a deadline which does not have a luxurious six-week window for the hiring of an IT specialist on a short term contract. Yesterday, having put off the inevitable all week, I finally had the nerve to explain to said provider of assistance that her particular approach to the task at hand – which involved the signing of formal declarations, step-by-step agendas, special briefing meetings, formal interviews and follow-up feedback sessions and signoff from senior executives- was somewhat out of proportion to the scale of the exercise of checking through the CVs of a few dozen applicants and deciding whether they meet the selection criteria. It was a pretty brisk discussion, ranging across a number of topics from her allusions to flagrant disdain for Commonwealth directives to my subtle suggestions that the approach in question was a load of absolute bollocks. Neither of us were particularly prepared to shift from our positions, so in the end she asserted that she was unwilling to put her name to such an abuse of procedure, so we mutually agreed that it was in the best interests of all involved that she discontinue her participation.
I have never so badly wanted hard liquor as I did after that discussion. Sadly only coffee was available, though several of my colleagues did wonder aloud whether, in the St Patrick’s Day spirit, I hadn’t irished it up a little.
Gah. One of my mentors describes project management as the art of identifying impediments to a project’s progress and eliminating them. There’s no doubt that this is the best thing that could have happened to keep Porkpie on track. Doesn’t make me feel any better about myself, though.
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