I've decided I've had enough
On the 3rd of October they started another wave of redundancies and this time, thinking through all the things I could do if I did get chosen, there was a sense of hope and curiosity. And meanwhile all year I've been getting physical stress reactions to the amount of organisational dysfunction and had already decided to take the next quarter off in leave.
And then someone pointed out that there would be another wave in March.
And in June.
And I guess, forever. Because that is how companies work these days.
I was very happy when they decided that they were going to introduce new ways of working in the last couple of years. Both for the tools that they were introducing and supposedly the concepts of how we do work I had been harking at for years.
I haven't seen that though. The message got stuck half way down the business somewhere in middle management that didn't take it seriously, openly derided it to staff as just a fad, didn't appear to understand the basics of the philosophies, and implemented a half-assed mess that just broke my heart. The flow of work was just so broken. It took me a year to work out why I had so many problems getting engagement with those who I needed to get engagement with doing my job. By asking a series of questions of the work flow coordinators they began to see the issue too. But I felt like I had wasted a year in frustration. Also locally it was a case of the original terrible way we worked, overlaid a little bit on some new tools.
The things I have learnt to value and believe in (that management say they care about) were just not valued. As a BA eliciting requirements tracing the value (that is, the actual customer experience), in small pieces, iteratively, from Product Managers who are meant to know what they want, through to what we actually build, what was happening was the old ways. The old things were collected into requirements (for all they might be put into JIRA, although most often I saw JIRA used as only a task list or a meeting minutes record), and then the solution created so the requirements were seen as not needed any more (because solution was all still in word documents, or maybe Confluence pages), and the test cases even would be created external to JIRA and based only on solution, not the original requirements/stories. Hence the massive disconnection from the original value that was meant to be built.
I've been a fan-girl of Atlassian for years having created a wiki as a kind of overlay, one stop shop, fast access of all the tools and information sources over a decade ago. I hadn't realised it was referred to as 'knowledge management'. Now I know that is a topic I have been doing my own research. And in the last year, having been handed a horrendously broken process where I was essentially a human mediation layer, I introduced JIRA ticketing and have discovered that I'm actually pretty passionate about taking manual processes on their journey from broken manual, to robotic automation, to proper system orchestration. And I'm also passionate about being a good BA. Doesn't look like I can do it here though.
I don't think they even know what a BA is or does actually.
The week I was teetering on the edge of making my decision some of the biggest dysfunction I experienced that year happened - in and around requirements for the actual self care interface if you can believe it. Discussed my decision with friends, went home and had the best night sleep I'd had this year. And then told my boss next day. And that was that.
So I've signed up for a BA certification course next year. I've signed up for a learning platform for certain skills I want to hone. I have a clear idea in my mind of what type of jobs I want. And I'll be looking for companies that 'get it' with regards to workflow ; call it 'Agile' or whatever... I just call it not wasting people's time and keeping your eye on genuine value.
And you can be damn sure I will be looking very carefully at culture.
