Now, give the cat some milk

A backroom Rottweiler

Nothing can be as irksome as interlopers encroaching on the areas of expertise of others to usurp a situation. A 33-year career in Information Technology leaves you too aware of many things that you find yourself restraining yourself from stating the bleeding obvious short of lacing your apparent vitriol with expletives.

In my profession, whilst I am engaged as subject matter expert, I prefer to stay in the background and feed my line management with the information and arguments they need to make to the business or entities for what we want to do. Where I do attend meetings, I am conscious of the fact that where the comfortable are being comforted the more and the afflicted suffer even more grievous affliction, I come to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

Don’t project your failure

That is why a project manager who thinks they can bend everyone to their will would hate an encounter with me because I do not mince words, I say things others might never find the phraseology to express.

Like when one said we have to work weekends if need be and I retorted, we all have lives outside of the work, that weekends could not be seized on without due consideration. I might have gone on to say it was a failure of core project management not to have properly assessed the time, resources, and cost to complete a project because no one talked to the people who mattered.

They really work you up

Teams are engaged to solve problems or create solutions as a daily activity, yet someone somewhere in the organisation rather than come round to discuss the scenario they need a solution for, they craft elaborate and pointless solutions not properly understanding the problem in the first place and put our backs up creating unnecessary angst.

If I had any hairs to pull out, I would be pulling clumps out daily. You wonder why they fancy themselves in our roles just to have the satisfaction of activity without achievement. If I were to direct my ire at them, I go on an exploration of the English putdown that acts like slow poison. Do I recall when someone was giving me grief and my one-line response was, “This situation has moved on from personalities to providing a solution.” Now, give the cat some milk.