You Need to Chill!

[Jay 2K Winger]

This is happening to a coworker, whom I'll call Lottie.

Lottie's an experienced IT person here at The Client. She's worked in various divisions, in various roles, at various locations, she knows her stuff. Her cubicle even has some challenge coins she's been given by some of the offices she's worked in. Lottie is one of the experts in the office, is what I'm saying, though she'll still ask for help now and then when she needs it. But because of her high level of competence, she tends to take on a lot of projects when she really should dole them out to others instead.

One of her current projects is a re-org. Some office is splitting into two separate units, and one of said units is on her plate. (The other unit has not yet filed a re-org ticket with us. They are not relevant to the story.) We'll call the unit [New Unit] or NU for short. This is one of those full re-orgs, with renaming of groups, movement of data, the works. The problem that Lottie has is that NU is practically harassing her for updates, every day. When she mentioned this to me, I had flashbacks to something similar but Lottie is dealing with something way worse.

NU's point of contact(s) are asking her when things will get done, repeatedly. A request submitted to rename a group? When will that request be done? How soon? Constant questions. When will that data get moved? Why isn't this done yet? How much faster can this get done? All this kind of thing, daily, sometimes multiple times in a day, and they want weekly Skype meetings to get updates from her.

She was venting about this to me yesterday, as it was especially aggravating to her then, because she was dealing with a technical issue at her cubicle. That's a whole separate thing, because the tech who came to look at it was... not helpful. I mention it because it does somewhat contribute to the stress she was under. I commiserated, suggesting she honestly tell them that the requests they're waiting on get done as fast as they get done, e.g. "it moves at the speed of bureaucracy." She has tried that, it hasn't slowed them down. I told her she should remind NU that they are not her only customers, that she does have other projects which sometimes take priority over NU.

It hasn't helped. Yesterday, Lottie had to switch cubicles because of the aforementioned tech issue, and the latest bug in NU's bonnet has been that some folders that Lottie moved over last week are empty. With their frequent hounding her, and their insistence that the folders had been accessed by their unit before the folders were moved, coupled with the tech issue stress, had Lottie genuinely questioning if she got something wrong. I did take a look at the folders in question-- both the original location and the new one-- and saw the "last modified" date on them was in April. I assured her that she seemed to have done everything right, but she agreed to send a ticket up to the server team, who can take a closer look and see if the folders actually were missing data.

The server team vindicated her. Lottie had copied the folders to their new location last week, and the server team went back a month and said there had been nothing in them. Lottie had not accidentally deleted anything. She relayed this information along to NU... who still haven't calmed down about any of it. They're now asking if Lottie can come to their office (which is in a completely different building) so they can watch her do this work so they "can see what she's doing." ("See what she's doing wrong" is implied.) Lottie shot that down, as well as NU's request to have their point of contact come to our office to watch Lottie work.

I've told Lottie she should-- after her weekly Skype meeting with them today-- just stop responding to NU for a day or two, for her own mental health. No responding to their messages, no responding to their emails, no answering their phone calls. Don't work on their re-org during that time. Focus on your other projects. Lottie has said she may have to do this.

Stuff like this is one reason I leave my Skype status on "appear away" so I'm not getting pestered by people. Hoping NU switch to decaf so they'll stop being so extra. Jeeze.

ETA--

Lottie just walked by my cubicle, after concluding her weekly meeting with NU's people. As she noted, "I just finished my meeting, and I'm still smiling!" Apparently, between the server team corroborating her not messing up, and her own admonishing of their behavior, they were a lot more respectful, and may be backing off a bit.

I congratulated her, reminded her "Now you need to make sure they stop living rent-free in your head."

[Jay 2K Winger]

Welp, Lottie's problems haven't actually diminished with regards to NU.

The pestering continues, and now I've been roped into this, alongside our coworker Mez. Boss Lady was back from leave, caught up on this, and decided that Lottie needed backup to help clarify things, and because the holidays are coming up, had me and Mez on standby to keep things on track and back her up. One of the things that led to this stress was that, contrary to our SOP, Lottie had not done our typical initial meeting, where we cover what the share data migration will entail, including a proposed structure for the new location (which the client is free to modify as needed), and has a basic rundown of the steps involved and what their responsibility is and what our responsibilities are. There also had not been any data mapping templates used, also contrary to our SOP. So this is down to Lottie screwing up, which even seasoned workers can make.

To that end, there was a Skype meeting where we were introduced, and NU's POCs caught everyone (Boss Lady included) up to speed on the re-org and where things stood. It turns out a lot of the pestering and confusion was coming about because of mail groups. Lottie has a spreadsheet of all their groups that will need renaming, and has not begun with that yet. Despite this, NU says there are new groups out there with their unit in the name, and thought Lottie (or our office) had been submitting to have them created, without informing NU. This is not the case, we don't yet know who created those groups yet, but that's where the apparent "miscommunication" was coming in-- they thought we weren't communicating with them about the new groups, we hadn't done so because we're not doing it.

Boss Lady scheduled a follow-up meeting with NU tomorrow, which I'll be helming, and laying out to NU "Okay, here's where we stand with the share drive. It went from neat and orderly and efficient to crazy bloated, completely against our standards. We can't fix that as-is right now, so we're going to finish the share migration to your new drive. Once we've got all that done, if you want it fixed, we can do that, but submit another re-org request first."

I did scold Lottie about her screw-up, which she took on the chin and admitted her fault to, and gently told her, "Don't do this again."

I did briefly get stressed out about the sheer bloat of the share structure and how much of a mess it could end up being, but I managed to get myself together and plot a way forward. Boss Lady did stop by my desk to compliment me by saying, "You're the best. I know I get on your case about things, but you do good work." Which did help soothe the lingering stress.

[Jay 2K Winger]

May as well give another follow up about this, now I'm helping on the re-org.

Once everything was cleared up about miscommunications and expectations, NU has been very understanding and not nearly as pushy as before. Lottie is still frustrated with some parts of it, but not due to anything on NU's side, but some limitations with the apps we have to use to do our jobs. We can muddle through and get the work done anyway.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Slight sort of update to all of this.

We got NU all set for the data migration, it just came down to when best to do it for the least impact to the users. We decided to do it over the Christmas break. I was in the office on Xmas Eve, it would break the monotony of an otherwise quiet day. There were 3 folders large enough to necessitate the server team doing the move, but there was a slight hiccup in that when I came back in on Dec 26, they hadn't done it, needing confirmation from the NU POC. I set them straight-- said POC was out of the office for the holidays, so I included the text of our email correspondence as bona fides-- and the migration went off without a hitch.

Except, when I saw an access request for one of the new folders, I happily took charge of it-- and found that the permission group was missing. It was gone, not in the directory at all. Permission groups are what allow users to access folders in the first place. And this folder had somehow been deleted. It remains a mystery how or why it was deleted. In any case, I quickly submitted a ticket to have the group re-created, sent an email to NU POC advising them of what had happened. Users would need to be re-added to the group through requests, as per SOP. (No, simply having the server folks find an old version of the group in backups wasn't an option.)

But between the holiday break, this group issue, and a variety of other access issues that people were having, my initial call to give NU until Jan 10 to verify the data turned out to be not generous enough. I understood, so I gave them an additional week. (Jan 17) Told the server team about the extension as well, since they would be deleting the 3 folders they had moved.

Then, because of continued access issues, NU asked for an additional week. I grumbled-- the server team was already not pleased at the old copies of the data still being extant on our servers-- but agreed to push it to Jan 24, emphasizing this was not standard and not to expect this in the future. Not that this stopped them from requesting one more extension as some people still hadn't been able to get into the new folders. I was pissed, but I agreed, and stated quite firmly, no more extensions. Jan 31 is the final deadline, the server team will not allow it to go on past that date.

You can imagine how I felt today, when-- mid-lunch, I might add-- NU POC messages me, "Hey Jay (this re-org may be the death of me)" I feared the worst, especially when they added, "we got a guy at the 11th hour saying he doesn't have access after I've sent out countless emails." I was not pleased, though it ultimately turned out to just be a network hiccup on the user's end, solved by a restart of his workstation. (Once again, proving the IT Crowd Mantra still applies. "Have you tried turning it off and on again?")

Me, Lottie, and even the NU POCs are all ready to have this whole thing behind us.



Mind you, once the re-org's done, NU will likely request another one, since they've agreed with my assessment of their share drive set-up being unnecessarily bloated. Instead of a comparative handful of permission groups for their folders like they had before (a total of 5 in the old location), NU's new location went from essentially 4 main folders to 20 main folders, each with its own permission group. Most of those folders were empty, and half of the ones that weren't didn't need to be divvied into separate permission groups.

All of that nonsense had been done before I was brought in to assist Lottie, and had been set up that way at NU's request. They hadn't realized the hassle until I showed them the issue later. When I came in on the project, I took one look and said, "Untangling all this, because there are people already using some of these folders, is too much right now. Especially since they asked for it this way." My decision-- agreed upon by NU POCs-- was that we finish the current re-org and get it finished. Then, if NU still wants it cleaned up, they submit a new re-org request for it.

Siiiigh.