Decay On Net

I’m beginning to worry about blogging about work issue. Been playing with facebook lately and added a few colleagues to my friend list. Well, they are close colleagues and I don’t mind letting them read about my work rant. But there are also quite a number of other colleagues in their friend list. And since I’ve added the cool ping.sg facebook apps, anyone who checkout my facebook profile would know about my blog. And they will know if I say bad things about them.

But then, what the heck. Why bother?

So.... Warning: Work Rant ahead.

A colleague of mine just gave birth to a baby boy last weekend. Congrats.

She is now on maternity leave. Meaning the team is short of 1 person for 2 months. Her due date was suppose to be 2 weeks later but I was joking with her last Friday that she better start her handover session soon in case she give birth on the coming weekend. And she gave birth the next day. Anyway, this kind of thing is rather hard to predict. Sometimes it would go off the mark by a few weeks.

Although I’m not under the same sub-team as her, I was expecting to get some of her work as I used to be from that subteam. (Plus I’m quite free lately. Look, I’m even blogging during office hours. Pray boss doesn’t see this.) At first I thought she don’t have any outstanding issue since I didn’t hear anything from her sub teamlead on Monday and Tuesday. I was on leave on Wednesday and when I came back on Thursday, I saw 1 big request inside my mailbox. Huge one.

And it is not those last minute request. The whole thing was in discussion since early September and they expect to roll out today. And the sub teamlead didn’t have any backup plans like getting a coverer ready and keeping the person inform about the latest developments. He thinks that the doctor’s prediction is very accurate.

And he didn’t notice that the request wasn't done it until Wednesday. I heard from my colleagues that he made lots of noise and complaint that he has no resource and stuff. True, he don’t have any resource to serve that request. But he could have requested for backup much earlier. Not until the last minute then make noise. He was lucky that he managed to get the requester delay the production date to next Friday. Else how is it possible for me to complete such a big request within a day?

And when I ask him for the details about the request, he couldn’t give me. Then how? Call my colleague and disturb her maternity leave? Crazy. Anyway, I managed to find the details after checking around and asking other colleagues.

Conclusion: Bad management. No backup plans, no tracking of what your staff is doing and no knowledge about the request. Sigh.

But actually, I’m the pot calling the kettle black.

I was assigned to be the owner of one of the request. Am suppose to consolidate the total effort by every team but I missed out one team. Its not that I’m careless or anything. But this team is never at the analysis stage and never need to attend any meeting or get information from users. Our team does their requirement gathering for them and send them the information for them to work on.

They are so isolated that I forgotten that they are in this project. Oops.

Posted by DK on Friday, October 05, 2007 at 4:19 PM