Managing

What do managers do? What is managing, and why is it so overpriced?

A manager from another team, let’s call him Steve, approached me to ask me if I can get him some numbers and figures for some project he was working on. “Sure”, I said. “Shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes”.

So about a minute later, my manager calls me up saying that we need to figure out whose job it is to do this. I said that it will only take a couple of minutes since I have everything ready, and that all I had to do is open up a folder on my hard drive and send over a file. I was told that since it was not absolutely certain that this was a job for me, I need to hold off.

So we booked a meeting with my manager and Steve for the next day to talk more about what Steve wants. The next day we’re all in a conference call, and it turns out that Steve was approached by Lisa, who I’ve spoken to many times in a separate project we are working on, and who I could just talk to directly. I told Steve and my manager that I can just talk to Lisa and figure this out, so I called her up. Lisa tells me that she asked for this data from the mainframe team, who then asked Steve for clarification because he is somehow a stakeholder when it comes to mainframe-related stuff, which this really wasn’t. Lisa also told me that she has no idea how this wound up through 3 different teams and 2 different time zones back over with me, and that maybe I need to talk to the mainframe team.

So I called the mainframe team and they told me they don’t know why I’m involved. We chatted for a bit and decided to have a meeting with all these different people. We were now in the third day of this “figuring out whose job it is to do this urgent task” exercise, and we finally got everyone on a conference call. Since day one, I had the email with the file attachment ready so that I could send it over to whoever needed it when we agreed that I could just do it, but I had to wait for the go-ahead after this meeting agreed on everything. We talked about the task for an hour, and finally at the end of the meeting, my manager managed to get Steve to fill out a formal request for me to pull the data to “buy us some time”.

Steve finally sent over the request and my manager immediately escalated it to his manager, who decided that I shouldn’t get involved in this task and finally, on the fourth day of this whole thing, I was told that I can breathe a sigh of relief and just forget about the whole task.

We’d managed to fend it off.

So I deleted the draft of the email I had with the requested file attached and was glad we saved all this time and money of not having to work on this one.