On Friday I was instructed to take over the lead on a piece of work assigned to Colleague M. Now Colleague M is a well meaning and intensely irritating little tit, so today was spent on a series of calls attempting to extract information from him in a structured way and get the aforementioned info inserted in to the relevant sections of a Solution document template.
You can imagine how delighted I was to hear such comments as "So, all you're doing is putting information that I have in a series or emails or in my head in to one spreadsheet" or the equally inflammatory "You seem to be spending a lot of time saying what we won't be doing". There was absolutely no fucking recognition that I was taking his scant items of information and using a common sense approach to weave a service definition that could be rapidly costed and contracted without causing financial exposure the Neat & Tidy Piano Movers.
Option 1 was to remind the moronic prick that I had suggested that he start to document the solution over a week ago, and had even provided the template to do so. In this option I would have also pointed out that he didn't have the intelligence to realise that I was defining the solution, it's components and how it was dependent on other Service elements.
Instead I went with Option 2, where I bit my tongue* and made vague statements about how well he had done in his initial investigations and how defining the solution would ensure that there was a clear and common understanding by all involved parties.
If I'm honest, it was actually quite rewarding to perform the interrogation and see the resulting solution start to appear from Colleague M's addled ramblings. We now have a pretty clear, high level scope definition and now know who we need to talk to about costs.
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* I had to bite it quite firmly
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