I think the author found the reason pretty clearly; this is the issue I run into all the time when a shit-task is thrown at my team. There are simply too many people bringing tasks that need to be done, but not necessarily by our team. I am comfortable telling people "no, this is not our team's responsibility, we don't have the time right now with our current bandwidth", but many people on my team are not. Worse, when I say "no", it's not uncommon that the task will still be presented to someone on my team without my knowledge, and my team will _gladly_ accept because they're not comfortable saying "no" to these persons (power dynamic, a lot of "fights" have happened trying to resist such requests).
I do tell the team just to ignore those requests and report them to me, yet the people making the bad requests just get more aggressive with their requests, either exaggerating the importance, exaggerating the requestor's "right" to assign the task to my team, etc.
The end result is that we end up closing the means to talk to my team or I am brought in more often to deny the requests, which means I'm spending more time explaining why we aren't doing stupid and wasteful things like giving some sales teams' client free work for a year (can easily cost 6 or 7 figures USD) without getting proper approvals from all the teams required to provide that work. Examples _like_ this happen way too often and it can be weeks worth of emotional meetings explaining why the original requestor needs to deal with the mess they made themselves.
My team is a bunch of IT professionals, and they should be doing IT work, not spending weeks convincing other teams to clean up the messes they made or preventing months of commitments for projects that should never have been approved, and it does _NOT_ feel good or right at all to make them constantly do something that is objectively not their job, and the end result is I end up burning out badly intercepting all of these requests.
The article was very relatable for me and EFT is a term I am going to be using moving forward.
But my personal frustration with scenarios that I've dealt with isn't about specific groups, it's that I imagine myself in like a kids TV show and we're all having to participate while some person in the company learns the value of being honest and taking responsibility for their mistakes.
except unlike a TV show, the stuff isn't resolved in 22 minutes, it takes months, if we ever resolve it, and it creates a lot of stress, frustration, anger, and costs a lot money.
and the person(s) who caused all of this don't learn anything except how to make someone else deal with the fallout of their bad decisions :))))
I do tell the team just to ignore those requests and report them to me, yet the people making the bad requests just get more aggressive with their requests, either exaggerating the importance, exaggerating the requestor's "right" to assign the task to my team, etc.
The end result is that we end up closing the means to talk to my team or I am brought in more often to deny the requests, which means I'm spending more time explaining why we aren't doing stupid and wasteful things like giving some sales teams' client free work for a year (can easily cost 6 or 7 figures USD) without getting proper approvals from all the teams required to provide that work. Examples _like_ this happen way too often and it can be weeks worth of emotional meetings explaining why the original requestor needs to deal with the mess they made themselves.
My team is a bunch of IT professionals, and they should be doing IT work, not spending weeks convincing other teams to clean up the messes they made or preventing months of commitments for projects that should never have been approved, and it does _NOT_ feel good or right at all to make them constantly do something that is objectively not their job, and the end result is I end up burning out badly intercepting all of these requests.
The article was very relatable for me and EFT is a term I am going to be using moving forward.