Baltimoremick.com

Now I shall take a moment to rant on office politics.  Granted, this rant is not about office politics in the traditional sense.  Instead, it is about creating more noise that requires time to address.

On Friday, I was covering for one of my team who was out of the office after working to the wee hours of Friday morning.  I should add that the matter involved the project I started on, but I have since moved on to the other expectations on my time.

Just as I was starting a meeting at 9 AM, I received an email asking for a piece of code to be migrated immediately.  I responded via email that it would take me a few minutes, but I would begin looking into it.  Additionally, I took my laptop with me to said meeting. I hate to excuse myself from meetings I have called, and I was loathe to do it for this meeting given the sensitivity of the subject.  Nonetheless, I had to focus on that meeting while I was starting to look at what had transpired.  Now, while in this meeting, here is what transpires:

• Developer looking to get the code into Production comes to the floor looking for me;
• Project Manager on said project calls my desk phone twice, and he leaves a voicemail for me on said phone.
• Director on said project emails my Director, who subsequently emails both my Supervisor and me.
• Project Manager calls my Supervisor, who knows I am next door to his office running this meeting, and my Supervisor comes in to ask for a status.

Now, in the time it took to have all of the above happen, I had completed my meeting and migrated the code that was being hotly contested.  The outcome of all of the above, though, was to merely create more noise and static that detracted from getting the task at hand done.

Instead of creating a lengthy email chain, the problem could have been easily resolved by calling my BlackBerry as opposed to calling my desk, my boss, and my father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate.  Sometimes, the most expedient way to get something done is the simplest way to do it.