I'm beginning to get really sick of fighting with people at work. Actually, people is the wrong word to use as its only really one person...
Bungle and I had a real humdinger this afternoon over something really innocuous, something so small and inconsequential but you would never have known it judging by the scale of the argument.
Bungle and I have both more or less been given team leader status over the last week or so, we have both been given extra responsibility, him for workflow management, me for database management and email administration amongst other things.
As we're both still sort of settling into our new roles upsets of todays type are only to be expected I suppose, but to be pig-headed about it, I'm still sure I'm right!
What happened was this.... I had a service call outstanding for one of my schools to repair an iMac. I'd contacted the school last Friday and said that we were very busy and that it probably wouldn't be me attending but someone would call. Then I got allocated something like 50 email administration jobs that were backlogged to hell and back. So I've been working my ass off for three days ploughing through the backlog, then to top it all, a maintenance routine on our mail server went kaka and it ate 7295 user accounts. So, this afternoon, I spot this lonely little iMac service call, all on its own, still not being attended to, so I decide that the best way to progress is to allocate it to Bungle for him to 'workflow manage' and get someone to attend to it.
The database we use maintains an incident list for each service department user. I told Bungle that I had an outstanding call and that I wanted him to allocate it to someone else to complete. He told me that it wouldn't be done until next week, which I know is bollocks, as I can see everything in the database and I know whats going on. I told him that I'd allocate it to him then he could pass it on to someone to cover. He told me not to as he prefers to leave things in individual queues then move the calls accordingly. My opinion is that this is very inefficient as it means a lot of extra work for him as he does not have sufficient permissions to move calls in other peoples queues (nobody does except me and my manager). He has to log in as an individual user to move a call to someone else.
I was like "Surely its easier for you if I allocate the call to you then you match it with the best person to complete it then pass it to them?"
His reply was basically "I'll do it my way"
And so it went on, and on and on. For nearly 30 minutes. It rapidly deteriorated into childishness, with Bungle saying
"If you allocate it to me I'll allocate it straight back to you"
It ended with him stomping off in a strop, refusing to talk to me and me allocating the call to him anyway.
The biggest problem with Bungle is that he hasn't actually grasped the concept of delegation yet, I feel. He has this thing where he freaks out if he has more than four calls allocated to him, he always has. Out of the ten or so calls I've passed to him in the last week, he's completed each and every one of them himself.
Its like "Hello! You can delegate calls to someone else you know, its only your job!"
Bungle is old school IT service provision, he doesn't grasp the concepts of modern IT service management or the techniques and tools involved.
*sigh*
Things must improve or there's going to be blood on the carpet.