“Have you ever been in a meeting towards the end of a project when a person who has not been to any of the preceding ones comes up with ‘small feedback’ that impacts everything?” Swami asked us the other day over coffee.
Jigneshbhai flashed a smile, and I knew what was coming. “Did someone like that come to your meeting last week?” he teased.
“Yes. And it turned out that no one else said anything to him, not even Raichand,” Swami reported.
“Who was he, must have been one of the bosses?” Jigneshbhai remarked.
“Everyone including Raichand was wondering who this person is.”
“And it turns out that he was someone senior?”
“Yes!”
“And someone problematic?”
“Yes!”
“And someone who can be a spanner in the works?”
“Yes – someone from IT – not from Raichand’s direct hierarchy – but senior enough for him to not say anything.”
“Like a distantly related uncle?”
“Yes!” Swami said, and both Jigneshbhai and I broke into a loud guffaw.
“This IT person had a ‘small feedback’- he said,” Swami continued. “That the system we had built can’t move to production till we gave it to him in a particular format. We had no idea what that format meant.”
“And as if that was not enough, in that call – which was supposed to be the last call – another senior manager, who had been absent so far, turned up. He pretended to be familiar with the project and asked a stupid question after this IT guy – about this format.”
Swami looked disturbed with the turn of events on a project dear to his heart. He had told us about it. We knew he and his team had spent serious time and effort on it.
“This is like the granduncle who turns up one day before the wedding, and then asks for changes in the menu,” Jigneshbhai said. Swami didn’t laugh. But the mood did lighten a bit. So Jigneshbhai continued.
“Remember that lady on the tour who changed the plan after everything was fixed?”
Swami smiled as he remembered the nut case.
Jigneshbhai fell silent for a while after that. Then he asked, “So what did you do about what the IT guy and that senior guy said?”
Swami looked up from his coffee morosely.
“What can we do? We set a new deadline and agreed to do some part of what they wanted,” he replied.
“Fair enough. Can’t do much beyond that I guess,” Jigneshbhai mused. “With this kind of late feedback.”
“But why don’t they ever turn up early on?” Swami asked. I could feel his pain. This time even Jigneshbhai seemed to empathize with Swami.
Jigneshbhai smiled. “Because early, they don’t have anything to say.”
***
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