Leisure time at hometown with little anxiety

I reached home at my native sooner than later due to the Covid-19 pandemic across the country and need to connect from home for the next couple of days before my long vacation. So, with much anxiety, I logged into my office laptop to check for new work and to my surprise, I did not receive any new emails from my onsite counterpart. I was much relieved about the work status and was browsing the internet with much anxiety, as my manager would dump all unnecessary work to me if he knows that I was going to be idle for the entire day. In addition to it, I also had a long vacation plan and my manager would extract as much work as possible before I go on for a long vacation. With each hour passed by, I was getting relieved about the fact that I was not getting emails, chats, or calls from my manager about new work, while I was taking rest at my hometown. Post lunch, I just wanted to check with one of my colleagues, whether only I don’t have any work or how about the work with other members in my team. To my surprise, he was also mentioning that no one the team had much work in their hand and all my colleagues were having a gala time at their home. However, all my astonishments and leisure time was ruined within a few minutes by my manager and to know more, please feel free to check out the blog posts in “G R Team Sites”

Going ahead with my plan to complete service request

So, I and the offshore delivery point of contact was working hard to finish the service request as early as possible and within two days we were able to complete almost all client requirements. For the first day, we sent initial work in progress document to the on-site team for review and was awaiting feedback from them. Until the next day, we did not get review comments or acknowledgment from the on-site team and now we have to take a stand to complete the work as early as possible. Therefore, I and the offshore delivery person concluded that, if there is no comment let’s assume that we are on the right track and complete the rest of the document in our day time and send the updated version as a final draft from offshore. The delivery lead was also acknowledging my suggestions and we agreed that we will go ahead with the discussed plan and if at all, the on-site team needs additional information we can plug and play wherever we could. One major concern running back of my mind was that the reason behind the on-site team’s silence, I wonder whether it could be that, the entire storyline might be different from whatever client had requested for or my storyline would be bang on with details of what client had requested. To know more, please feel free to check out “G R Team Sites”

Initial effort to complete services request

So, my manager pulled me into support the last-minute service request for my teammates and I had to understand all the client requirements within a short span of time. I tried to read all the documents that the client had shared earlier, however, I was able to cover only a few of those documents. With my understanding and expertise in completing previous such requests, I had to complete an entire service request. I called my teammates to understand more about the service request and I was able to get only feeble insights and some usual stuff. I started by putting in some standard content from my repository and drafted a rough table of contents with my understanding of client requirements. I was not even included in the discussion calls and not all the information shared by my teammates was enough. However, my manager was persisting to complete the documents as early as possible and his inputs for the completion of the document were out of the world. It was completely irrelevant to the client's requirements and the delivery team was asking me to reject all his suggestions. To know more about key highlights while completing this service request, please feel free to check out the “G R Team Sites”

Background information about upcoming service request

The moment I joined the call with my manager for assisting the delivery lead for pulling up the existing slides from the repository, he started to provide background for the new work out of nowhere and requesting me to schedule recurring calls for next weeks with onsite team for discussion. I was completely taken aback by this approach and was waiting for the call to get over, so I can discuss with my manager about taking up the work. My manager was still in assumption that the delivery lead was expecting to share existing reusable slides and the moment I stressed about being new work coming out of nowhere, he understood and was requesting me to provide support for the service request. From the initial discussions, the service request seemed to be easier pick and all I had to do was analyse existing knowledge repository and pull in some existing slides and reword it based on the client requirements. However, as usual it turned out to be most irritating service request by working with my manager and delivery point of contact assigned. To know more about the service request, please feel free to check out “G R Team Sites”

Working on irritating opportunity with tight deadline

Now I jumped onto the deck, started filling the slides with the standard information available with me and shared it with the delivery person. To safeguard myself I have marked this mail only two that delivery person and specifically in the mail that it was only a draft version based upon the topics suggested by the onsite team and it can be customised further. I didn’t know that this mail would protect me from further escalation from my manager and never thought the delivery person would drag me into this pit hole. I came to know the importance of the deck only when my manager was reviewing the deck and commenting on the slides and validating with me, why I had those slides included and the deck was all over the place. To more what happened further on this opportunity, please feel free to check out the blog posts in “G R Team Sites”

Recurring calls and the first updated deck for review

So, I scheduled recurring calls with all the team members and the leaders to review the daily updated decks and get the necessary from the onsite team. On the first day I had a very draft storyline in place, and I had few information copy-pasted from the earlier decks for the review. The call started, the on-site team was immediately checking for the latest slides for the review and they were expecting everything to be in place on Day 1. I was completely furious, however I couldn’t express it in the call, as there were any top leaders and delivery leads in the call. I was patiently going through the slides and explaining it to the on-site team, the purpose, the required inputs from each team and the outcomes that we wanted to call out. In that initial call, everyone was fine with the storyline and was expecting it to be continued in the next week recurring calls as well and was forcing me to have the updated deck by Monday evening call. Learn more about what happened on the Monday call, detailed in the G R Team sites.