My job the next two days is to act as glorified Hall Monitor for training the Service team on the new system.  I asked the PM whose ass I’ve been saving how I ended up with this group, and his response was simply a smirk. He said he knew I’d keep them in line.  Yet another example of no good deed going unpunished.

This team has been driving me nutty for the past few months.  The core team members for Service are stuck in the victim stage of coping with change.  They are wishing things would be different.  They are waiting for others to decide and communicate with them what the change will be.  They are sometimes ignoring that change is happening.  In other words, they take the exact opposite approach to things as I do in these situations.  Many times, I want to grab their shoulders and shake them while screaming “get involved!!”  

Last week, the core team members for Service got pissy with me.  We were in a status meeting.  It was Thursday.  And all week, they had been making smart ass responses when asked how the training material was progressing.  We would never provide a reasonable status.  So, on Thursday, I called them out on it.  We were looking at materials others had been doing, and it was clear that they had nothing.  Our consultants had been offering help (but they weren’t taking it), other core team members had been offering help (again, not taken), and the PM even offered to meet with them to ensure things were setup for their success (again, nothing!).  I called them out, and they got pissed at me.  Up until that point, we didn’t even know they had started the process.  I guess making them angry finally got an answer.

Today, they are doing training.  If you can call it that.  I’m opinionated.  I have a definite way that I think training and such should go.  Usually in any sort of training, the leader takes you through the transaction steps once.  Then they set people loose to do a few on their own.  Then they move onto the next transaction.

When I asked if they were ready, I got a smart ass response of “it’s not like this is real training with a syllabus”.  Could have been had they gotten their shit together.  I asked if they had an agenda.  Again, the same smart ass comment about this not being real training was made.  I ask who is taking them through the transaction the first time.  “We’re not doing it that way.”   One of their smarter cohorts commented that it sounded like they may be doing it wrong.  I told them to proceed how they had it planned, I was just surprised.

I’ve hit the point 20 minutes into the 8 hours of training where I’m like “whatever”.  They are going to have to live with these consequences – not me.  I’m just trying to make sure that their shitty planning and training doesn’t negatively impact the other groups who are reliant on their data.  I told the leader of the training what they need to capture and provide – and discovered they haven’t been paying attention even in the meeting where we talked about this process. We had created a central location for putting the data created so that the other groups have it for their training.  They missed the 5 times we had discussed it.  I reminded him again, showed it to him, and told him to get on it.  

I may have to chat with their boss about this later.  I’m having flashbacks to when we did this 7 years ago with our existing system.  They did a half ass job with training, the go-live went horribly, and everyone involved with Service got fired.  While I don’t really care about the latter of those consequences, I am annoyed that we are going down the same path of user failure.  Especially since we have time to mitigate it now.  

I guess we’ll see what happens. Until then, I’ll be online messing around as a pretend to play hall monitor.  

Good times.