Oops! Forgot to tell the Project Leader

Hank writes his new year Note from The Cube . . .

Funny thing happened last week while setting up a "Track the Pack" departmental Project List for the new year: 'seems the people who are supposed to do those projects for the next year weren't informed of that fact.

Awkward, you see, since the "Track The Pack" list is just a monitoring tool, not The Message itself. We here in our Admin cubes don't make decisions, we just follow the progress of those decisions, make charts illustrating the progress (we make beautiful charts) and disseminate those charts to the executives. (More precisely, we give it to our VP alone, who theoretically shares it with her equals.)

Consequenently, then, we found out about the gap between the Project List we Adminnie Cubes possessed - and the Project Leaders' knowledge of their duties - when it turned out there was zero zip zilch progress on everything listed to us as "New."

Now this gets really funny funny when you realize that the "New" projects were painstakingly negotiated during a two month Budget process that, in theory, found every Manager meeting with his reports, then presenting their plans to the Directors - who, in turn, visited them upon the VP - then back-and-forth a few times as projects were rejected outright, more info was asked on some, some were revived as other departments were consulted, da-da-dum da-dum. Long process.

It beats me, then, how seven out of seven Project Leaders did not apparently know what their new projects starting the new year are supposed to be.

How could Management...?

Then again, these selfsame Seven (and their seven times seven cohorts in the related departments) have a collective amnesia about such do-dads as ISO standards, FDA regulatory procedures and OSHA equipment guidelines. Hence, annually, we all get the joy of being retrained in stuff that I have memorized from repetitious boredom - an' ah dinna even do tha tasks!

So... Is it a typical Management communication-by-osmosis glitch --- or equally typical Employee selective memory?