ELISA ENGLISH's Blog 英語園地

How to be politically correct?

If you ask me, you are asking the wrong person.  As someone who hides nothing on her face, who says almost everything on her mind, who sucks at communication, I am the last person who knows how to be politically correct.

I hate office politics.  I don’t know how to shield myself from harm’s way, so I try to stay away from it.  However, I do occasionally get drag into it.  This time, I was tasked to manage a high profile project with significant impact to the company.  The owner wants it delivered in no time.  However, operational procedures and approaches weren’t defined and finalized.  It is impossible to manage a moving target.  Usually we will have the luxury to keep exploring different options if we have the time.  However, with a tight deadline, we should be moving into design and build now, rather than exploring alternatives.

I have to be extremely careful in explaining to her what will happen if we do not nail down the requirements.  I already got a call from her asking why we could not provide a high level estimate, followed by a visit from my VP, asking where we are at and if we will need to rewrite our requirements all over again.  The problem is that the requirements are not complete.  Anyway, I stated that since she believed the requirements to be thorough and pretty complete, I will move forward with getting the requirements sign off and requesting for a high level estimates based on that.  Any future change will be considered as a project change and will be re-estimated.  Just a day after our talk, she decided to explore a different alternative.  This is what I have been afraid of all along.  I hope that I can get out of this vicious cycle of analyzing the alternatives.  All these should be decided well before we started the project, not waiting until the last moment.  Otherwise, we will never meet the target date that was placed upon us.