Just Another Day at the Office

I thought about all the things I wanted to do and then shortly after decided to put them on the backburner. Moving forward, I have no time to spearhead this big project, which would essentially dovetail on the back of the last one I tried to implement.

I thought about reaching out, but ended up circling back because I didn't have enough bandwidth. The problem was, nobody kept me in the loop. And, not only was I unable to get down to the granular details, but I couldn't bring anything at all to fruition. I decided to super-check all my facts about everything before taking this completely off my radar, but before I knew it I was drowning in an overload of info-share. What happened to the back-end operation? I was drowning in my own list of action items! It was time to bring all hands on deck. But I wondered, did anyone have any availability?

After initiating a very long meeting to discuss our options, we came up with a list of best practices -- a sure-fire way to delight the client. For it was only a matter of time before we would bounce back.

 
I asked a colleague to build on what he thought was a good way to strategize our plan, but he couldn't get enough buy-in from upper management.

"Try to get people on-board," I said. "That's the key to a win-win."

"I'm just sensing a real disconnect here," he said. "I can't seem to get any real leverage."

After drilling down for 45 minutes we really honed in on key areas that needed work. We developed a list of core competencies and took some time to whiteboard our ideas. After all, our drop-dead date was literally by COB.

"I can't seem to codify any of these bullet points into a real outline," he muttered.

"Well, why don't we noodle on it for a while and focus on some areas that will really bring our functionality up to speed," I quickly replied back.

"That sounds good," he said. "I have a hard stop at noon anyway."

While he was gone, I couldn't help but do my due diligence to outsource my ideas to a turnkey organization. So, I held a kickoff meeting to get everyone aligned so we could put this thing to bed. I was glad that I was going to get real face-time with key stakeholders.

I held the meeting with a group of folks who knew what my vision was. And, after I ramped them up, I advised them to draw straws so I could assess their skill sets. If I was going to have any success in Q1, this would have to be a real soup-to-nuts kind of deal. But after the assessment was over, no one would take ownership. So, we eventually had to parking lot our ideas because I was going to be out-of-pocket for the next 4 weeks. So much for taking this meeting offline!

But before the session was over, I decided to find out what everyone's number 1 takeaway was.

And then, out of nowhere, my colleague stepped back in the room and muttered, "Are you kidding me? I was supposed to be tasked with that!"