Yesterday at 1:00 PM, I was pulled into a 45-minute "sync" to prepare for an upcoming 60-minute "alignmentAlignmentForcing everyone to nod on a Zoom call so no single individual takes the blame when it fails." meeting. The burn-rate timer hit $4,600 before we even finalized the agenda for the actual meeting.
Here is what actually happened.
Because a Senior VP was scheduled to drop in on our Thursday SD-WAN steering committee, the Project Management Office went into full panic mode. To ensure we had perfect opticsOpticsIt doesn't matter if the project is on fire, as long as the status report is color-coded green., a project manager mandated a "pre-meeting" with ten senior network engineers to rehearse our talking points.
We didn't discuss the BGP routing issues, the unmitigated ISP latency, or the failing IKEv2 tunnels. Instead, we spent thirty-five minutes debating how to phrase the project delays so we wouldn't upset the executive layer.
We were strictly forbidden from using the word "outage." We were told to refer to it as a "degraded performance anomaly." We were instructed not to mention the vendor's catastrophic firmware bug, but rather to say we were "optimizing the firmware deployment cadenceCadenceHow frequently we will interrupt your actual work to ask if your actual work is done.." We effectively paid ten highly certified infrastructure experts an exorbitant hourly rate to act as corporate spin doctors.
The grand finale? The PM felt we still lacked alignmentAlignmentForcing everyone to nod on a Zoom call so no single individual takes the blame when it fails. on slide four, so they generated a new deliverableDeliverableThe PowerPoint deck we will present to prove we actually did work this week.: a post-pre-meeting touch baseTouch BaseA 30-minute meeting to discuss things you already emailed them about yesterday. scheduled for Wednesday morning to finalize the font choices before the actual meeting on Thursday.
We didn't configure a single router yesterday. We just spent nearly five thousand dollars in payroll rehearsing a PowerPoint presentation about why the routers aren't configured yet.
Total waste generated: $4,600.
Next time a project manager schedules a meeting to plan another meeting, don't argue. Just accept the calendar invite, sit back, and start the timer.
