Archive for the ‘office politics’ Category
Requirements
“We need a CMS.”
“Well, maybe you do. What do you intend to publish?”
“We won’t know until we have a CMS!”
This very exchange took place about 2 months ago, and I failed to hear the giant, raging alarm bells.
Fast forward to today: I’ve integrated a CMS with our existing stack and now our designers, developers and UX team are ready to begin creating the assets and modules our marketing team will need for their content. So I let our marketing team know that they can begin creating content in the CMS, in fact we need them to do so so that we can discover what assets we need to create.
The response?
“How can we create content if the assets aren’t ready?”
Uh..
“We can’t create the assets without the requirements. We need you to spec the pages to generate the requirements. It’s a CMS, so you can spec the pages by creating them directly.”
“We won’t know what content to create until we have the assets to work with.”
What’s really going on here is a combination of an avoidance of work and a desire to have an impact. Specifically, a marketing team leader who joined the company quite recently and wants to impress. So us integrating a CMS system is really his/her big thing, a real and tangible project to gain kudos and add to the CV.
Nevermind that we have a team of highly competent front-end developers. Or that although our release cycle is currently a bit long (2 weeks) we’re automating that process and soon we’ll be able to release at the drop of a hat. Or that we don’t actually update content very often. But I digress – this post is about worker-avoiders.
Now that we’re at the stage where we need the marketing team to step up and pull their weight, I’m realising that what they want is to have everything (everything) laid out like a giant lego set, with which they can create a website by plugging all the pieces together. They want the pieces to be created before we know what they should be. They don’t want to have to specify what those pieces should be. They don’t want to work.
There are a lot of people out there like that; people who avoid work. Often they’re not actually blocking anything, so you can just sidestep them. Usually they don’t want to block anything, because they know that would mean they’d need to stick an oar in and help. But sometimes they lead you up a cul-de-sac, and then you’re stuck – you’re relying on them. That’s not where you want to be.
Now I’m in a situation where I need something done and I’m deeply concerned that it’s just not going to get done. The communication is also terrible (these people have never worked in an Agile way before) so I’m concerned that even if the work does get done there will be revisions coming too late. I’m at the mercy of people who are lazy and ascribe too much significance to their role. Which means that making requests around how they work is fraught with risk.
It’s difficult to spot a work-avoider, but some of them are also work-creators. Like in this situation, this is someone who creates a load a new work but doesn’t take any ownership over getting any of it done. The giveaway, in hindsight, was that first conversation:
“We need a CMS.”
“Maybe you do. What do you want to publish!”
“We won’t know until we have a CMS!”
That person did not know what they wanted to use the CMS for. What I should have realised, from that confession, was that they hadn’t done any sort of design or preparation around what content they want to publish. They hadn’t done any ground work, and they had no intention of doing so. What I should have responded with is this: “Until you have some idea of what you want to create, you can’t know what your requirements are. Tell me what you want, and I’ll draw the requirements from that for you.”
This would have the dual benefit of providing you with realistic requirements and, more importantly, forcing the ideas-people to think their ideas through a little. Hopefully during that process they’ll see that some ideas fly, and others plummet through the air like fat, stunted chicks whose mothers impatiently nudge them out of the nest and into the real world.
But I only see this in hindsight. Next time I hope to see it coming.
