Little Thoughts…

Chatper 10, How Not to Annoy People ;-)

Berkun begins the chapter by telling his readers how people out in the work place can get annoyed very easily. He says the 3 things that annoy people most in the work place are e-mails, meetings, and team processes. Berkun then goes on to give a small list of different reasons as to why he gets annoyed easily at work and I can find myself identifying with a few of them. One of the categories that jumps out at me is the “waste my time” section of his list of things that annoy people. It doesn’t happen very often at my job now with Libbey but when I was at my internship working for Adam Street Publishing there were several occasions where they made me waste my time and pretty much gave me busy work. I can remember once instance when my boss asked me to design a t-shirt for an event the Toledo City Paper was going to be throwing and I spent most of the day drawing out a design for the shirt (it was a back to school themed shirt so I drew lots of school related objects). After my design was complete, I found out that they had had another employee go behind my back and create his own t-shirt design that the company ended up using and no one was going to tell me my design wasn’t acceptable. I was furious because I had wasted a lot of time and effort on my design for no reason.

Next, Berkun begins to explain what a process is and how teams use them. A process is a systematic way of doing something, or the steps taken to get a job done. Every job has a different process and as Berkun says, ” any idiot with power can come up with the most mind-numbingly idiotic system for doing something and force the team to follow…” which is very true. At my job right now we have a process we must follow when preparing artwork for screen printing and if we miss or leave out a step it can cause major problems down the road. The author says, “The trick in creating good processes is to understand two things: what makes projects and teams successful in general, and what makes the current project and team different from others.” This is crucial because a lot PMers want to use the same process over and over and sometimes that process doesn’t apply to the current situation. A good PM should know how to adapt to their situation and create new processes when needed.

Another important topic Berkun touches on is the formula for creating a successful process. He says DT+LT+(AT*N) = a good process. He talks about you have to figure in the time to design the process, how it takes people to learn it, the actual work the process takes, and you multiply it by how often it’s done. The author’s next big topic in this chapter deals with annoying e-mails and how to write successful ones. This is becoming a major thing at my job because most of my communication to sales people is through e-mailing and not very many of the sales people I deal with e-mail me properly. I don’t like it when I receive e-mails with no capitals, misspelled words, poor punctuation, and half ass messages. It happens to me all the time and most of the time if I get a bad e-mail I will call the sales person to have them explain to me what they were trying to say. I could literally type up a book on this subject so I am going to restrain myself 🙂 E-mail is a HUGE part of the workforce and I think people should learn to e-mail properly and have to on a daily basis. Like Berkun says, if the group leader e-mails his or her group and uses proper spelling, ideas, etc. then the group will be encouraged to respond in the same manner. Berkun then goes on to touch on the topic of what a good meeting is and how you can achieve one. He says the only way a meeting is going to successful is if people can facilitate with one another because otherwise it will be a big waste of time and everyone in the meeting has to get paid so it can be a huge waste of money that could’ve been spent on solving problems or getting work accomplished.