~Mitt Romney
I was at work for a total of 12,5hrs today. Not because of my own lack of keeping up with my workload, because another person failed to keep up with their responsibilities.
They were handed a project at the start of November and were briefed to have the strategy in place by the start of January so that the project could be rolled out by mid-Jan and all the other pieces of the project could be plugged in and everything would run smoothly according to the timeline.
Come the start of Jan and this particular person had done nothing - they hadn't even started conceptualizing the framework for the event they were supposed to project manage so it then fell to someone else to make a plan. We had to get an event company to take over this internal role because the person had failed to live up to their obligations which then in turn created a huge pile up of work for everyone else.
The schedule for the event was meant to be disseminated to all the sponsors and stakeholders over a week ago, but they were only provided the information on Monday and the first event is this coming Sunday. Needless to say they all started panicking in terms of time to activate their sponsorship rights, not to mention that we then had to scramble to market the event - which hasn't even gone live yet and there are merely days to go...why?
The result of one person dropping the ball which then had huge implications and knock on effects for everyone else down the line. Did he even think about that? Probably not, I wasn't in the communication when the project was essentially removed from him and handed over as he simply couldn't deliver.
Will he ever be trusted again with project managing an event? Probably not. I think he's burnt his bridges in that regard and while my manager didn't convey her annoyance directly in four letter words, I could tell by the vast amount of work that we have had to cover in these last two days that she's not impressed at all by his lack of integrity.
It is not the first time that it's happened to me in a work environment - and won't be the last. All that I can say is that I was impressed to see how everyone else has come to the table to bridge the gap and get it sorted.
