Tag Archives: meeting

How you know it’s been a good meeting…

Posted on by

Bureaucrats, as a group, are big fans of meetings. When we’re not sitting in them, we’re preparing for them, discussing how they went, or pondering what other topics are important enough to warrant having their own meetings. If you plan your day just so, you can step from meeting to meeting and never once have to risk accomplishing anything that might accidentally be considered a productive use of time. Pretty much the only guaranteed think to come out of a meeting is that there will be more work on your desk once it’s over than there was before it started.

If you step back and honestly asses your own experience, when was the last time you walked out of a meeting feeling good about how much you’d accomplished? Alternatively, how often do you walk out of a meeting feeling like you had just spent two hours of your life that you were never going to get back? Personally I can’t remember the last meeting I was in where the salient points couldn’t have been dropped into an email and circulated to those with a need to keep track of such things. More often, the whole thing could have been avoided if two people passing in the hallway could have had an “oh, by the way” moment and restricted the exchange only to the people who actually care about a specific topic or issue rather than subjecting the entire office to an afternoon of torment.

If you’re a proponent of meetings, do you know when you’ve just had a good one? I do. It’s when the senior person in the room stands up at the end and asks if anyone has a clue why we just sat through that and then walks off shaking his head.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Potty talk…

Posted on by

Depending on where you work, there are many things that must be handled in a “right now” time-sensitive manner. Without question, sometimes minutes or seconds count. In fairness, though, 99.997% of the time, what we’re doing doesn’t fall into that category. We’re not defusing bombs and we’re not performing heart surgery. We’re writing reports and creating PowerPoint presentations.

Occasionally, because of pressure being exerted from echelons above reality or our own inflated sense of importance, we’ll mistake our report writing and PowerPoint building for an actual life or death situation. I’m going to go on the record here and say that no matter how important you think the issue is, there’s nothing we’re doing on a day-to-day basis that can’t wait until we step away from the urinal.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Prep time…

Posted on by

We’ve been over this 20 slide PowerPoint presentation four times now. The last “dry run” – which lasted just shy of three hours – cost about $3500 when you account for the labor cost and overhead of the nine people who were stuck in the room listening to the Uberboss dither about changing “happy” to “glad” and deciding that he didn’t like sentences that he personally added to the charts three days ago. The lunatics are plainly in charge of our asylum.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

A matter of priorities…

Posted on by

So far we’ve had two meetings today with the Uberboss. One topic was a training program that no one wants to participate in and the other is about a report that literally no one is going to read. How do I know that no one will read it? Easy. The office that requested the report in the first place no longer exists. But I digress.

I’m not saying that management has its priorities jacked up, but at some point in the near future, we might want to actually schedule a meeting about the year’s budget request that has been rejected twice now by the home office. Way back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I was an MBA student, I learned that having a budget and sticking to it was among the most important things I needed to do as a manager. Maybe I missed the day when they went over the part where they were joking and really the budget was just something you should blow off since no one really needs money anyway. Or maybe he just went to a different school.

So, once again our fearless leader is at war with his own superiors. Yeah, I’m sure this is going to end well. Maybe we should just schedule a meeting to talk about new signage for office doors… Which would be funny if it weren’t already on the calendar for next week.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Guesswork…

Posted on by

We’ve had three successive meetings this week about the exact same topic – Which 10-12 people are “essential” to continue operating in an emergency even if that means they must work from a fallback location somewhere outside the commuting area. Also of topic: Are we calling things the correct name? – Crisis Action versus Crisis Management. Continuity of operations versus relocation. Telework versus alternate workplace – but what no one is talking about is how they intend to pay for any of it or where people might reasonably be expected to go. Which is all well and good until someone actually wants to put their plans, and I use that term loosely, into action.

What I’m guessing will happen at that point is 75% of people who you previously decided are essential are going to be launched to the four winds trying to find safe shelter for their families or themselves, trying to keep their home from being overrun by floodwater or looters, or will just plain decided they want to go somewhere else when the excrement intersects with the ventilator. Fact is that you can give people whatever title you want, but you can’t make them do much of anything once they’re outside the four walls. That’s one of the perks of being a civilian instead of a soldier.

Until you can actually start answering some of the hard questions, good luck in trying to nail things down how anything might actually works in a worst case scenario. What you’re doing is not planning, it’s charitably described as guesswork.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Meetings…

Posted on by

It’s not an official duty day without attending at least one meeting. It is, therefore, imperative that we have an effective and efficient means of coordinating who should attend and when they should arrive. If only there was a widely available and heavily used computer program that would make that possible. Oh, yeah… Outlook does that. In theory. What setting up meetings in outlook really does for us, though, is generate mass confusion surrounding any meeting that we might ever attempt to schedule. In fairness, I suppose it’s not so much an Outlook error as it is operator incompetence.

Scheduling a major meeting at our “organization” (i.e. any aggregation of more than four people) involves a process that looks something like this:

Step 1: Set up a meeting request in Outlook

Step 2: Change the time and/or date of this meeting at least three times

Step 3: Receive one or more cancelation notices

Step 4: Get three follow-up meeting requests either the same or slightly
different than the first

Step 5: Receive a reminder email from the meeting organizer two days before the meeting

Step 6: Receive a reminder phone call from the meeting organizer one dat before the meeting

Step 7: 15 minutes before the meeting receive 1-3 automatic reminders from Outlook depending on how many of the original meeting requests the organizer remembered to cancel.

Step 8: Arrive at the appointed conference room to find it empty and the lights off

Step 9: Consider the misguided series of steps that led you to your current career.

If you’re lucky, the no one else will figure out when or where the meeting is actually supposed to take place either and you’ll at least have a nice quiet conference room to hide in for a while. Quiet weeping is optional at your discretion.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Calendar…

Posted on by

When Pope Gregory “invented” the calendar, he was working under the belief that having a single universal standard that today was really “today” and not some time in the middle of February would be a good idea for the Christian kingdom’s of Europe. At the very least, it would allow everyone to hold their major celebrations and feast days at the same time. Good stuff if you were a Pope in the 16th century. Most people today keep a calendar for the same basic reason. It’s a hellofa good way to keep major events organized and make sure everyone shows up to them at the same time.

The rub comes, of course, when no one can agree what is supposed to be on a “major event” calendar. Senior staff meetings make the cut, but not inter-staff meetings. The Uberboss’ days off are on there, but not the senior staff. Multi-jurisdictional exercises show up, but sometimes not local exercises impacting people in the building. Some events are listed three times because whoever put them on there can’t figure out how to change the date and/or time of the original reservation. And keeping track of the hot mess that is our calendar falls to junior staff who a) Don’t know what the schedule is supposed to look like; b) Aren’t told when things change; c) Have never been given clear direction about what events “make the cut”; and d) Have no authority to demand information from other senior staff offices. Sure, that’s a guarantee of getting a good product.

The way I learned it back in the days when dinosaurs ruled the earth was that if you are given responsibility to do a thing, you should also be given the corresponding authority to make that thing happen. Having one without the other, well, is about as productive as trying to put a high gloss of a pile of feces. This little endeavor isn’t something that should be hard to do… but the players involved almost guarantee that it will be an exercise in futility… But the again, that’s never stopped us from wasting inordinate amounts of time before.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Welcome douchbag…

Posted on by

We’re getting a visit from one of our regional managers. That’s not really unusual. It seems there’s always one of them wandering around the building for some reason or another. This visit is only special because the manager in question is pretty much a giant douchebag. That’s actually speculative on my part because the guy has never actually bothered to show up or call in for any of the regional managers meetings that have been scheduled in the six months he’s worked for us. So really I don’t know anything about him other than he doesn’t do meetings, or return phone calls, or think policy applies to him. Come to think of it, I’m pretty ok with standing firm on my assessment of douchebag.

The issue isn’t so much one of the guy being off the reservation most of the time as it is that no one in a position to do anything about it seems to a) know it or b) feel compelled to take action. That’s just a solitary example of why having actual leaders in leadership positions might actually be important. You’d think by now I’d have developed a better ability to manage my expectations. It’s probably best to just go back to my cube, keep my head down, and get the day over with with as little increase in my blood pressure as possible.

Do you think hanging up a “Welcome Douchebag” banner in front of the building would be considered somehow inappropriate?

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Respect the rank, not the person…

Posted on by

We’re the government and no self respecting government agency goes more than a day or two without having a meeting. Mostly, given our slightly inconvenient location just outside of BFE, we keep our meetings to ourselves. Sadly, though, there are times when someone vaguely approaching the definition of a VIP shows up. Such an arrival, of course, requires a meeting befitting the distinguished status of the guest. That means the development of many, many wonderful charts… because the more charts presented for your consideration, the more important you are in the hierarchy. And then there’s the hardcopy – because a VIP apparently can’t be troubled to remember something from one minute to the next without having a fist full of paper slides in front of him. Reading the ones projected across the room onto a 8×10 foot screen would certainly be below his esteemed level of dignity.

With enough notice, it’s generally possible to make anything happen. Deciding at 8:30 that you want to change half the slides for a meeting starting in half an hour, sure, that’s manageable. But for God’s sake don’t come back ten minutes later and tell everyone they’re late to the meeting… that isn’t supposed to start for another twenty minutes. And then pace the aisle sighing and making comments under your breath about being unprepared. When the only thing keeping someone from beating you to death with a keyboard is an ingrained sense of respect for rank and a desire not to go to jail, it seems best not to antagonize that many of your underlings all at one time.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Doing it on webcam…

Posted on by

I work for a guy who likes to think his time as a system administrator in the late 1990s qualifies him as an authority on issues of office technology. If those of us with a passing awareness of tech, this is a very bad situation. It means we’re in a position of being forced to agree with ideas and recommendations that are not only expensive, but also doomed to sink into the befuddled mire of advanced middle-age angst over technology that is one of the defining characteristics of our “leadership cadre.”

Two years ago, we were instructed to buy two dozen webcams and run a test with our agency’s behind-the-firewall proprietary knockoff version of Skype. The test was, as I described it at the time, less than successful and we recommended shelving the project. Most of our test bunnies couldn’t figure out how to plug in their cameras and of the ones that did, only a handful managed to actually use them. I’m pretty sure they just ate the microphones we sent them. To be fair, I should point out that this failure wasn’t completely the fault of the doddering soon-to-be retirees. The network infrastructure in our building was something less than robust enough to handle the “load” of several simultaneous streaming audio/video connections. It was sort of fun to say something, run to the office across the hall and see yourself “in real time,” but we decided that wasn’t going to be a real plus-up to our collective productivity. After the abysmal initial test, I assumed the idea was left to die quietly in desk drawers and file cabinets around the country. As is so often the case, I was wrong.

I discovered last week that we ordered 50 more webcams to be issued to all of our field offices to “improve communication” and “facilitate meeting online,” since the organization doesn’t have money for our traditional cross-country boondoggles these days. Now, if I had even the slightest notion that any of these devices was actually going to be used, I’m all for outfitting every computer in the office. It would be great to have one official feature on my work computer that I’ve been using for free from Google for years. My concern is only that we already find it nearly impossible to get our “leaders” to pick up the 100 year old pice of tech that’s already on their desk and talk to one another or call in for a teleconference. I have no idea what makes us think we’ll be able to get them to use “magic” to talk across the intertubes?

Then again, it might be fun to watch them try.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.