Meetings At Work

Have you ever had a day when you see someone walk into your office/cube you just know it means two extra hours of work? It happened to me today. In walks one of the IT application developers and asks if I have a minute. We begin to talk and he wants to totally change the agreed upon process that we are trying to fix. I say "Whoa, we just cannot make this decision, let me get my boss." I IM my boss and he says he will be down in a minute. While we wait he starts telling me the story of how he spoke with the UI/usability developer IT has on call and they think there is a better way to make this scheduling program we are working on. The new way is entirely in Outlook, which is great, but consists of multiple meeting requests being sent and received BEFORE it would even go to the client/vendor. Unacceptable. We talk for about an hour as the IT guys try to explain why there way is better. It is not. My boss and me are fighting back and telling them that we had an agreed upon process and now they are totally changing it. Ohhh, and by the way, we have a meeting with some analysts tomorrow to show them the agreed upon process. This is crazy. After an hour we decide to cancel the meeting tomorrow and just the four of us meet and chat more about this. My boss walks out and the two (yes, there is two now) stay in my office so I can gauge my bosses thoughts/body language for them. I told them, "This is not happening, we are going with the system we talked about last week. There is no way I can go in front of the content team and show them the convoluted system they want to do. The IT guys keep saying, "Hey, this is what [UI guys name] says is the best way to do it. The analysts do not want to use SharePoint." I told them that I no longer care what [UI guys name] says I will not OK the system he wants. Basically, these IT guys were crazy and it goes to show that your IT team does not know your job as well as you do and they might give you suggestions on ways that they think might help you, but you as the IT team client needs to step up and make a final decision and have the guts to tell IT, "NO, that is not the way this is going to happen."

The real bad news is that this meeting got me home way late and I disappointed my wife again. I am such a jerk.