isn’t this… a political comic?

I used to work on a fairly famous project. One time, we had a major quirk in the data, our QC failure rate dropped suddenly with no obvious reason. Normally a drop in failures is good, but we hadn’t done anything to cause or affect it, so it was cause for concern. My staff and I brainstormed some ideas and settled in to dig into the data and figure out what was going on.

Then the questions came. Have you considered this? Have you considered that? How is it going? Any updates? Status update in an hour.

An analysis that should have taken an hour was now taking many hours. Why don’t you have answers? We should work this weekend to figure this out!

It was really frustrating.

In my experience, it’s less PIP and more “let’s schedule daily check-in meetings and please send us hourly updates in Slack.”

The trick is to be overly communicative before it gets to that point and push back on things when you can. People are generally understanding, but watching time pass without having any clue what progress is being made is scary. Especially when there are important deadlines and you have no control over or insight into the project status. Quell those fears without impacting your productivity too much and everyone will be much happier.

We need a weekly meeting in which we discuss, which meetings are necessary and which are not

This isn’t a comic. This is simply a snippet of real life.

Where are their legs?