There was a sub-department meeting yesterday that seemed annoying and pointless to me. The bulk of the meeting was the WMBD boss talking about the roles and job descriptions of everyone in the sub-department. He got questions, so I guess there was some subtext or underlying issue that he had to clear up - and if so, see previous comments about him being a bad communicator; stuff like that shouldn't go unsaid - but from where I sat the meeting was just a discussion of what everyone in the room already knew.
Today, though, I've been tempted to ask my immediate supervisors questions like that. Because I'm getting caught in the middle of the latest round of problems with the doomed project. Background: officially, the only people on project teams I'm supposed to take orders from are H. and maybe R., the lawyer. Realistically, though, H. knows as little about substantive issues as me, and they both have other jobs to do, so when a SME asks me to do something relatively simple with the document, I don't bother running it by H. or the lawyer first.
So I didn't think twice when a SME asked to meet up with me so we could resolve a dozen or so relatively minor issues in the document. After the meeting was over she mentioned to me offhandedly that big changes to a certain section were in the pipeline. That sounded ominous. I asked if we should let H. know. The SME said no, because H. had this crazy idea that people were going around behind her back and cutting her out of the loop. So we shouldn't tell H. this because it would just encourage that.
The problem with that should be obvious.
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