21 June, 2005

Reviewing the situation

I have to confess that I'm developing a few reservations about staying here long-term after the last couple of weeks after watching recent efforts to make the departing Project Team Leader take the blame for things that were going wrong months before he was even hired.

Leaving aside the ethics of the situation, common sense would suggest that if you're going to start including "prepare scapegoat" as a project objective, you should at least be more subtle than asking someone to commit to completing in two weeks an activity that was originally scheduled to take 82 days. Otherwise the person you're trying to scapegoat may start getting suspicious.

It's been suggested that the people in charge are either untrained or just plain daft.

My money's on daft. All the Project Office people I've spoken to seem to have a reasonably good idea of what they should be doing (and an even clearer idea of what everyone else should be doing), but they seem happier working in a culture where they get to call all the shots without taking any personal responsibility (which tends to lend weight to the idea that "people" actually encompasses both actual humans and bald apes with a talent for mimicry).

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