I hope most of you do not have a manager who is ready willing and able to complicate tasks that should be very simple!
Why do they do that? What's the point? - I guess he just likes to make our job harder.
For a while, I hoped that would change. That didn't happen. It is very exhausting and now I am looking for a new job.
8 replies (most recent on top)
@2vsg, there's nothing wrong with that.
Or maybe they need to justify their own jobs.
There are lots of reasons you manager may make things more complicated than you think they should be.
- Perhaps is something as simple as documenting the activity for tracking. That's useful to justify your job to management, evaluate issues and whether resources should be used to fix them, etc, etc.
- Or maybe it's for auditing so we know you're not doing something illegal.
- Or maybe they use it to determine how much manual effort is involved so they can work it into the customer's pricing.
- Or maybe they just want to make sure you aren't sitting around watching netflix.
Why are there still middle managers that are pointless and just schedule unnecessary meetings??
Perhaps there's a good reason for extra steps and you don't have the big picture.
@bsm+1hlFWsC9 - you forgot to mention that a steering committee needs to be established with weekly meetings (daily when management thinks there is no immediate progress) and a flood of powerpoints have to be prepared and reviewed before each meeting
I used to have a manager like this. For her, it was a control issue, as she was a control freak, and needed to put her stamp on everything, and I do mean everything.
Like you, I like to keep it as simple as possible, and she would always find out how I was doing things and insist that I make changes (sometimes at the last minute) that seemed overly complicated and unnecessary.
It was very frustrating, so I feel your pain.
I am happy to say that I no longer report to that nutter.
Every simple task requires an end to end flow chart, an excel model showing how much time each of those steps in the flow chart takes, 2 or 3 subject matter experts who can describe each of the required steps, a written procedure that defines each of those steps, an offshore team who can do the job for much less (but not necessarily understand it) and an overworked team member who knows how complete the task in about 1/10 of the time it takes to do page one of the end to tend flow chart.
Sound familiar?