If one thinks about it, the tables have turned, sort of. Discounting my teaching stint, for the past few years, I have been changing jobs, mostly not by choice. So before I got used to a new environment and superior, for some reason or other, I had to leave. Now, I have somehow stuck with this company for almost two years, yet within this period I am here, I have changed five superiors in all. Just when I finally got used to one’s working style, another one comes and revamps the whole system again.
It would not be so bad actually, because a new person always means new opportunities. But the problem is that the people here are not in the habit of keeping others in the loop of what they have done and what they are doing, so when people leave, no one else had any idea of some of the things that were done. And with the turnover rate at some departments, things become even worse as people have to tell the same things all over again.
For instance, each time when my company develops any land to build any property, there will always be five steps. First is the Joint Venture. Second, the Management Agreement and Design Services Agreement. Third, determine the cost of the construction and start construction works. Fourth, determine the party of the construction works and start billing for services. Fifth, the project is finally completed and commencement and formal opening dates will then kick in. Of course, there will be several other steps in between along the way, depending on how smooth the works are, but these are the essential steps.
What happened last week was that on one of the projects which my former boss was working on, the first step had been completed. Documents have all been executed and in order. Apparently, no one gave any instructions on when and how to proceed on the second and third steps, when all of a sudden, someone sent me an email, saying they are proceeding with the fourth step as they need to bill for services. I was really puzzled, because by right, if the other agreements have not been executed, construction works should not have started, so there should not be any billings as yet.
Worse is that we were given a shelling by our Financial Controller. She said how could we go ahead and bill for anything when the agreements were not even in effect? She then asked who were in charge of the rest of the agreements, and people just started arrowing everyone else. In the end, everyone threw the whole thing to the Business Development department, and needless to say, they were not happy about it.
Anyway, it was our Business Development department’s responsibility to come up with the Management and Design Services Agreements for all projects. People may ask me, is that not my department’s job? By right, it should be, but since the Business Development department is the one sourcing for new places to venture into, they are the ones that come up with the initial signing of the agreements, before passing over to other departments for the rest of the steps.
The thing is that the Joint Venture Agreement for this project has been executed, and the other agreements (unsigned) are attached as appendixes to the Joint Venture Agreement. And since my former boss left without telling us anything, we had no idea where he kept his copy of the agreements. The Business Development Executive asked me for the soft (Word) copy of the agreement, but all I have is the scanned copy in Adobe format. So I got blamed. How would I have the documents if this was handled by my previous head and he did not keep me in the loop for any of the negotiations? Why blame me when I am really not in the know?
Actually, the Management Agreement and Design Services Agreement are quite standard and we have templates for these. I do not see why they could not just use the template and edit from there instead of screaming at me when I really had no idea what exactly happened! It was no use asking the new Counsel and Head because they are equally stumped as this case (or rather, the first step of this case) was settled before their times.
In the end, I had to call the IT guy to come in and re-activate the account of my previous superior. So we had to hack into his notebook, extract all the relevant information, and backed up all his data and files into our shared drive. Luckily the required files are amongst the lot! I sent the whole lot to my colleague. Hmmmm… when I got the information for them, there was no word of gratitude, yet when I really did not have the information on hand, I get blamed for everything! Honestly, editing from an existing template saves much more time and trouble than hacking into someone’s notebook and extracting all the data just for a file which could be edited from any template!
This is the trouble of being sort of middle-ranked. You are not high enough to command authority, but yet you are too “small fry” for those lower-ranking ones to take you seriously or show you the due respect and recognition. My best friend just told me working life is like that, it is the same everywhere, one just have to get used to it. True, it is the same everywhere, so even if I change job (not that I am thinking of changing for now), who is to know it will not be worse?
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