Chaos at work

I have been attached to this project since last February and from then on, things have been a bit chaotic. To be honest, I really didn’t want to join the project in the first place. Didn’t feel I was the right person to go. I still don’t know why the bosses chose me (I still want to think it was because there were not many people left to choose from). I did try to reason with the boss but what to do… if the boss says go, we have to go.

Anyway, I did mention things have been chaotic, right? The project started way back in April last year. We were brought in to help out in the Implementation phase. Let me tell you, it is REALLY TOUGH to implement something when the earlier team didn’t do a good job during the Business Review phase. Syndication wasn’t done properly; they proposed something without checking with the appropriate department, we didn’t get enough buy-in and since everything was done at a high level, people didn’t really understand what was going on.

It also doesn’t help when the Project Manager is being difficult. All he does is sit in his room, doing God knows what. He only comes to see us when he wants to review things. It pisses him off when we start questioning things and thinks we are against the whole idea. We are not against the project and understand its intent but the reason we are questioning is because we want clarity on certain things. We were not there during the review phase so isn’t it logical that we are going to ask questions? Please make us understand so that it is easy for us to sell the idea to the stakeholders. He doesn’t attend some of the key meetings we have with the stakeholders; he’s not there with us in our team discussions, so of course he wouldn’t understand the difficulty we go through. The stakeholders have raised some concerns and we perfectly understand what they mean because it makes sense. When we tell him (Project Manager) about it, he doesn’t seem to care. He makes us feel like we are a bunch of idiots and it looks like we just have to do what we are told. It’s driving us crazy!! I’ve been involved with a number of projects since I started working and this is my first encounter with a Project Manager who doesn’t seem to have a clue of what to do.

Things have been so intense and my mind has been so pre-occupied with the mess at work that I don’t even have time to feel sorry about myself. I felt so down during the first few weeks of the project, questioning my ability and all. Sometimes I do get the same feeling but I try to ignore it by making myself busy. What else can I do? I’m just going to contribute and perform to the best of my ability. Whether people recognize it or not, is another story.

Oh by the way, I also just realized that I’ve been using the same handbag for the past 3 weeks!! Talk about being so engrossed with work….Nak tukar handbag pun terlupa :)