Jananas

If you know me, then you know this about me – I do not suffer fools gladly. More than anything else, its that I don’t like incompetence.

Last year I was editor of the Rotman Yearbook. I did a pretty bang up good job and because yearbooks are one of those things that often aren’t given a lot of recognition, I’m going to officially and publicly pat myself on the back. I did a lot, I learned a lot, I put out a good book, and I did it at a profit.

Here’s the problem. The person who took over for me is incompetent. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. This isn’t just me saying this. The situation was so bad (as in they’re two months away from the end of the school year, have missed two deadlines already, and are on track to miss delivery entirely) that the student council called me and asked me to step in and help. To summarize – the current editor messed up so badly that they’re having to pay money to fix his mistakes. In most jobs that would get you fired.

I have of frustration dealing with the current ‘editor’. I’ve been told how much ‘easier’ this person’s job is now that I’m on board to do layouts. Major problem with this statement? I’ve spent as much time tracking down photos and pertinent information for them as I have on layouts. In fact, this person is essentially a glorified admin assistant tracking down the photos that I’ve asked for (and that they should have already had!). I don’t like having the amount of work I’m doing devalued or belittled. Especially when they aren’t even able to provide the information that I do need, thus increasingly my workload dramatically.

For example, we have a section for photos of the first year study groups. Right now I have most of them, however they arrived in folders labelled ‘section 2′ and then something like IMG_7XXX.jpg. The problem with this is that I need to put names (and the correct names otherwise heads will roll) to faces, but I do not know these students and further have no access to school websites to even get access to this information. Thankfully I was able to go through other channels to get a copy of student photos and names, but now I have to go through the photos and essentially match them back to people which dramatically increases the time it will take to get something that should be simple done. Needless to say, I’m not please that a very simple instruction has been ignored completely and that my time is being wasted when I’m doing someone a favour (I guess it just means that the work will cost them more).

Even worse, is that the current editor officially has their PMP designation. Yes, they are an official project manager. I have no idea how they’ve fucked up this badly – they’ve obviously not done any research to define business requirements or deliverables, build a project plan with deadlines (and a work breakdown structure going backwards from a hard and final delivery date), define risks, or even think for that matter. I guess they might think that as a project manager their role is to direct from higher ground, without having to get their hands dirty. Well, fuck that! In fact, they even went as far as to blame some of the volunteers for the confusion that photos existed in. I quickly pointed out that as the manager it was their responsibility to provide direction (which requires understanding what’s needed and why). To which I got the phone equivalent of a blank stare.

You can’t be a good project manager if you don’t understand what you’re dealing with. And trust me, this person doesn’t. Example – they asked if I was doing layouts on my desktop… Which is difficult given that we do it all in an online system, you know cloud computing and the interwebs, and all that good stuff. Really folks, it isn’t that hard to pay some modicum of attention to the world around you. To put this in perspective, I was able to teach myself how to use their online system in about 20 minutes – it isn’t that hard if you read the faq’s and have any knowledge of enterprise software (and I’m not even a designer!).

It kills me that I recently applied for a job and was turned down because I didn’t have my PMP designation. And yet here’s a great example of how little value designations really have. Someone with their PMP has fucked up a project so badly that someone without their designation has had to be called in to fix it. Give me common sense any day of the week.

This post probably would have stayed in my head had I not received a voicemail yesterday asking me for a “status update” on how I’m doing. Oh my, what a good little project manager you are! Here’s the deal, when I’m being paid to fix your mistakes and do 95% of your job and have to go around you in order to get most of that actually done, don’t call me asking for “status updates”. Fuck off and let me do your job.

So yes, I do not suffer fools gladly. I do not appreciate having my time wasted. If I could, I would shout it out to potential employers to not hire this person that’s how incompetent they are.

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