Joined a fast-growing company thinking that it would be interesting and a bit less bureaucratic than my previous employer. Around the same time, the company started a major hiring binge that included a huge number of “program managers” who seem to do nothing other than create huge numbers of status reports, all reporting the same things to various managers who have been promoted up due to growth in the ranks beneath them, but who all still seem to want direct involvement in everything going on 2 and 3 layers down, with each of them wanting it with different timing and in a different format.
Last quarter, we were told that going forward we were going to formally track all “cross team dependency items” which was basically anything that would take more than one day of effort from another team. Since my team provides services to pretty much every team in the company, and requires them to cooperate, pretty much everything we do is a “cross team dependency.” Previously we had just handled these either with tickets between the teams, or informally if they were other teams that we worked with frequently.
This meant everything was being tracked twice: in the system we use to actually manage our internal workflow, and in the system that new upper management wanted us to use so that they could “track cross team dependency planning.”
I dutifully created the dozens of tickets to track all these before the end of December, as did my counterparts on other teams. We then had weeks of discussions to “rationalize” these and ensure they weren't duplicates and nothing was missed. We ended up with close to 2000 items for somebody to track. We wasted the better part of a month on this.
As far as I can tell, nothing was ever done with the information collected and nobody's ever followed up once it was all documented to the satisfaction of whoever needed to be satisfied. I still have no idea who decided this was a good use of anybody's time.
After a large round of complaints from everybody involved, we were recently informed that going forward, we would not be doing this as a once-a-quarter exercise, because it needs to more accurately reflect the current needs, so it'll be continuous. And we will have a new process to track it all. And we're all invited to mandatory “cross team dependency management training” so we can know how to do it right.
I had just spent the better part of a week caught in the crossfire between two managers about the formatting of a spreadsheet (no, not kidding), and eventually being told that it shouldn't be a spreadsheet it should be an internal web page and then arguing about how that should be formatted for 2 days.
I couldn't take it anymore. I quit. My old employer wants me back at higher pay, and while it won't be as much on paper, it's still worth it. The ability of otherwise apparently smart people to create pointless work in order to elevate themselves might be the missing force of nature that cosmologists can't find.