Capital Expenditure Request
Adler reviewed a CER today for one of my projects. The document is about 100 pages thick and describes the business case benefits risks impact requirements functional technical design budget and timeline of a large scale project that will never be implemented. We’ve spent the last 6 months working on this document. And while that’s only elapsed time the project was put on hold twice it’s still indicative of our inability to move projects through the pipeline in a reasonable time frame. But since my job is to delay projects as long as possible and use all the budgeted dollars for planning to insure we never move into the build phase I continue to be ontime and on budget.
Even so Adler annoyed me in the meeting today. Adler is in charge of the PMO and is the only person in management who actually does anything. What he does however is completely useless. The more useless work he does the more useless time the rest of us expend going over it. So today we went page by page discussing “formatting issues” of this particular CER. Bold this underline that. Now while I did not do any of the work on this CER I got credit for doing it. And since I did not do the work on this CER I was not offended by the ridiculous formatting criticisms. I was however annoyed because of all the extra work I would have to pretend to do to rectify the issues even though someone else would be doing the actual work.
The problem is if you complain about Adler’s useless criticisms he will complain about your shoddy work. If you thank him for his useless criticisms he will praise your shoddy work. You can only self promote so much. Sooner or later senior management needs to hear about your strong performance from someone other than you.
Tomorrow I’ll mention to Fessler how helpful Adler has been in delaying this project.
About the writer: R.L. Fielding has been a freelance writer for 10 years offering her expertise and skills to a variety of major organizations in the education pharmaceuticals and healthcare financial services and manufacturing industries. She lives in New Jersey with her dog and two cats and enjoys rock climbing and ornamental gardening.
Related posts:
