What a couple of wankers!

I've already mentioned that my Boss has asked me to manage the handover of work from a pair of Contractors that will be moving on in a couple of month's time.  They both have a reputation for being wind bags and slackers and, so far, my findings have reinforced that view.

Today I had workload review calls arranged with both of them and I turned up promptly for the first with Contractor M.  I had already picked up M's most significant piece of work because he hadn't got a clue how to move it forward to completion. As we worked our way through his very short list it was apparent that he had one key task that needed attention and he had done fuck all with it in the three weeks that it had sat in his work stack.

He has been coasting for a while now and, if I am honest, there is little point in kicking his arse at this late stage*.  Instead, I pointed out that he had an administrative role looking after a configuration management database and he was going to be spending the next few weeks preparing a "Dummies Guide" and performing knowledge transfer to some selected colleagues. 

He is an evasive little fucker and I am going to have to keep a close eye on him to ensure that all of this happens. Step 1 in the management of this was a full set of meeting notes with actions that were issued to him and our Boss.

The second call was with Contractor R and this took place about forty minutes later.  I had been focussing on this chap's work stack since the beginning of April and had already proven that eight of his nine work activities required zero input from him.

At this point I will acknowledge that the ninth work activity is a bit of a beast, but I had spent the past few days preparing for this call and had summarised the task, the deliverables and the fact that all Colleague R needed to do was prepare a Service Description Document.

We spent the next eighty minutes in the most ridiculous discussion where it rapidly became apparent that R had absolutely no plan to close out this work activity.  It appears that he is simply revelling in attending inconclusive customer calls and claiming that a lack of requirements is preventing progress.

I'm a completer/finisher by nature and this situation is absolutely abhorrent to me.  This chap is being paid a fortune and is happy to coast along spouting nonesensical bullshit to conceal the fact that he is making no attempt to drive this activity to conclusion.

It is fair to say that I came very close to going ballistic at a few points in this discussion, but kept my temper in reasonable check and formulated a plan to delimit the requirements as they were currently understood and to develop the solution definition document to align with the pricing that is being developed by a frolleague of mine.

Funnily enough my manager got another meeting summary with a proposal that the current documentation should be abandoned and that I should manage the production of the necessary document. 

Let's see what he says when I get back in to work on Tuesday.

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*  and that would be my Boss' job, not mine