A Tif

Here's an example of how this whole team thing has been going. I got an email from "Freddie" today. He had taken responsibility for two of the final chapters of the project report on motivation and training. Well, he intended to round up the two full time students and I think have them feed him valuable journal articles and he'd put it together. I heartily agreed, since I'd been trying to marshall the whole team and had watched as they all just did what they pleased, on their own schedules (now I'm not saying I didn't miss deadlines, but at least I'd send out works in progress that were more than cut and paste jobs). He hasn't gotten any help so far, and sent out a three pager today on one of the chapters, with cut and paste from journal articles to "point" in the direction he wanted to go. "Freddie" asked for comments, so I spent 10 minutes reading it over. The first two pages were going in the right direction, but the third page was a copy of article text that just restated knowledge management, without direction towards the chapter subject.

So I told him this in an email. Now, you have to understand my feelings on this. I am fed up with this cut and paste method. Either they have left the copied text in, as is, without citiation, or they have reparaphrased it so horribly it's unreadable. Furthermore, every person on the team has spent half of their chapters restating what KM is! In fact some of the chapters have contained nothing of the subject, but have just restated what KM is, over and over, badly. Well, I had enough, so I shotgunned my response to the group, saying that the first page seemed ok, but, for god's sakes, quit beating a deadhorse, chop it out and get on with it.

Freddie's response was that there was no info in the journals for training workers to use KM and motivation should be covered in earlier chapters. He said that he'd be in a holding pattern until Tuesday, when we met. WTF?!? Uh, this is the topic of the chapter that has been on the table for months now, since December. I don't ever remember anyone saying that they had a problem with the structure, except "Carmine." More on him later. So I told Freddie, essentially he needed to look harder, and that motivation was NOT embedded within those chapters, so get moving! He shot back that this was TEAM project (could have fooled me) and that he'd wait to hear what the team had to say about. Good f'n luck. The team will sputter and probably not even understand what he's talking about. And he still gets to sit around tonight not doing anything. Awesome.