When you work on a software team at a company that is splitting in two, things can get complicated quickly.

What would you do if you kept getting invited to urgent meetings, but you didn’t know why?

That is what happened to the guy in this story, so he finally joined only to find out they wanted you to turn your work over to yourself.

The Handoff

I won’t say specifically which industry I work in, but I work on a small DevOps-ish kind of team.

This sounds like a lot of work.

We write the software, we support the software, and we accept professional services contracts to configure and manage this software for you as well.

It interfaces with a bunch of other software the same company I work for sells, so there’s a whole suite of products you can get from us in similar circumstances.

I’m sure they will have to pay double.

Currently, one of our customers is breaking themselves up into two companies, so our suite of products is also getting set up as a migrated install in a new environment.

Same products, just the data necessary for the new company gets migrated. Not rocket science. But because this involved big companies, the levels of bureaucracy and project management gets insane fast.

Good, he is all set.

For my part, I’d managed to get my piece done quite well. Database and product was set up as far as it could be, just needed to know what data needed to be migrated for the new company, and some other information to integrate it with the rest of the suite we sell.

All told, I was ahead of most of the other apps involved in this move. This is where things go screwy.

Oh great, now what?

Late one day, I get a meeting invite for the next morning from some guy at the customer company I’d never heard of about some “handover”.

I could infer that this was about some part of the endgame for the migration of the product which I knew wasn’t ready yet due to the fact that they hadn’t provided the necessary information about what to migrate.

He doesn’t think that he is needed for this call.

I also checked the list of other people on the meeting, they also knew about the state of things, so I felt safe in declining the meeting as it was scheduled for a time I had already booked as Out Of Office.

I get in shortly after lunch and check my emails, and I’ve got one labelled “URGENT” from this mystery guy, saying that I needed to fill out some mystery “handover” document required for the migration, required by end of day.

Why do they even need this information?

No information about what actually needs to be in this document, or who the target audience is, or who’s handing over what to whom.

I ask these questions, don’t get a response for almost an hour (clearly its VERY URGENT), and then all hell breaks loose in an email thread, and then URGENT IMs start bouncing around.

He asked a simple question, but they won’t answer.

Mangements of all types at all companies involved are CCd, project managers are arguing, and none of it answers any of my questions.

One guy manages to schedule a meeting for 3PM to get it all sorted out.

I bet he just wants them to get to the point.

I join this meeting, I’m the only guy there from my company. Everyone else is from the customer company.

I ask my questions again, and start to get answers. Apparently in this migration project, there’s a “migration” team, and an “apps management” team, and I’d never heard of either of them.

He does not want to be there.

But, I’m the guy for my app, so I got in this somehow.

One guy says I should write the doc to hand the app over, another guy says someone else should be writing the doc for me to get handed off to… wait a sec.

They are very confused about what is going on.

I ask flat out “which team do you think I’m on?”

Two different project managers answer, one for each team.

Oh, that is too funny.

Remember when I said my DevOps team is small? I’m the only guy on the paperwork for my app for this whole migration, so I’M ON BOTH TEAMS.

The fact two teams existed was completely invisible to me as an external service provider.

Hopefully, they can see the humor in this.

These guys got their whole company’s knickers in a twist over a document I had to URGENTLY write to handover MY app to MYSELF!!

I turned on my camera, shook my own hand, and declared the handoff complete.

Good thing they aren’t making a big deal out of it.

It was accepted.

Just to check the box on their paperwork, I still wrote the doc, took like ten minutes once I was actually told what needed to be in it.

Wow, what a mess, but at least it all worked out in the end.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

LOL. I’m sure it was great.

It is remarkable how many meetings people sit through.

They just love wasting everyone’s time.

Meetings are often a waste of time.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.