I’m not doing my job unless someone is unhappy

I realized something the other day. I am not doing a good my job unless someone is unhappy. Normally this isn’t me or anyone at my firm. Instead it is usually someone at the client company. Luckily for me people are unhappy with me because I am not playing by the client’s internal politics or because I am putting someone under pressure, I’m certainly not making people unhappy because I am acting as one of the Bob’s from Office Space interviewing people to layoff. Even if the new systems I put in do reduce head count over the long run, I have talked to people in my firm that have had the role of eliminating jobs and it is one I certainly do not want. Generally I just make people mad because I follow marching orders that they can not control, and I do not wait on them for anything. If we did this we would never hit deadlines. The funny thing about this is that it makes the people that actually do my reviews very happy. My manager always tell me not to worry about the client people that are less than satisfied, it is normally because they aren’t used to being driven to produce to others schedules and they don’t like it.

Honestly I have never worried about it much. I guess this is a little abstract so a quick example may help. Recently I have been doing work to migrate data from legacy systems to their new SAP system, specifically financial data. It is important that we don’t wait on this process because it is critical to the company running once they complete switch systems. I was given direction to get my work ready for a test run by a certain date. The client personnel had not decided yet that they agreed with that date. In fact a few days (yes after things being scheduled for months) they objected to my work being included in the test. We went ahead anyway. The test was a resounding success and we learned a lot from it, but it pissed off the client personnel that we did with out them being able to look at all the work before the test; to bad for them that their own management was on my side of the situation. So when the started sending nasty emails, they were the ones actually called out on the carpet.

I have always found this amusing. People that are part of projects that cost hundreds of millions of dollars think they can hold things up because the used to be in control of a very small part of the overall scope of the project. They have always made the rules now in the bigger system they will only be a cog. They are actually to gain much more marketable skills from playing along, but instead they fight it. Many times these people are let go and replaced by will participants. But there has yet to be a project where there weren’t a significant percentage of people that were unhappy with me. In the end they always get over it, or I deflect their anger towards management, or they tend to disappear. But I think in any other profession the amount of upheaval that I personally cause in my current job would be looked at as a negative, but here it gains me praise. It is actually something that has endeared me to this type of work. We get to break through the politics and focus on goals and process. Because of the impact of our work on the clients in general we get the backing (usually) of upper management. It is certainly different world to play in than most people in the corporate world that is for sure.

FYI if you are drafted into a large project at work run by consultants, your better off going with the flow and picking you battles than to generally trying to control everything yourself.