Whether in your personal life or your professional life, there are times you will need certain information in order to finish a task. There are also times you will need to provide information in order for someone to complete a task for you. In either case, without the proper information, the task can’t be completed.

That’s not a hard concept to grasp, right?

In this story, it seems to be a hard concept for some managers to grasp. A systems administrator sends out an email to every department clearly stating what information he needs, but he doesn’t get back all the information he requested.

Keep reading to see how he handles the situation.

I may be good but I’m not a miracle worker.

So I’m a Systems administrator for a large company.

We have recently rolled out a new ticketing system for the users to use.

I told them 3 to 6 months to get it all up and running but the project management team say na it can be done in 1 month. That’s a story for another day.

They worked really hard.

Me and my team worked our butts off for the last month. Coming in early, leaving late. Most days we were working 12 gours a day doing what we can to roll this new system out company wide for the due date.

We made compromise with the PM team stating that when it is rolled out some functionality won’t be there as they haven’t given us the time to develop it into the system.

They were fine with this.

He told the department what he needed from them.

With the new system comes new reports for different departments directly from the system.

Now I sent event department a email with very simple instructions of what we required to build these reports which is stated below.

Report Name What reports need creating What is the criteria of each report Schedule Who to each report get sent to. What information will needed on each report such as ticket number category status – Will need this individually unless all report will have the same information required. What layout is required – Horizontal or Landscape Output Format – PDF (l advise against this if they want there pivot tables still) or Excel

He did not get nearly all of the information he asked for.

Low and behold the information I got back from the department and the project managers was the below.

Welfare Support Welfare Admin Welfare Time to close ticket

They give me stupid and unreasonable deadlines and 2% of the information i requested i give them exactly what they said.

A report that shows the close times of tickets for the specific department with 0 other information. Doesn’t show what tickets they relate to when they come in who submitted them.

He wasn’t messing around.

Safe to say they were not happy and they said thats not what we asked for.

I referenced their email with mine below what we required to build the reports and a statement under stating your report will show the information you provide to me. Once your report is done we will be moving onto the next. Failure to provide the correct information will result in going to the back of the queue.

They decided to ring me and get mad with me so I hung up and move onto the next report which had sent us everything correctly and were very happy with there report.

Be nice to IT otherwise your mega urgent and Important stuff goes to the back of my list of things to do.

Ps. Be extra nice to your SysAdmin as they can just revoke licenses as they please.

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This is a basic case of not following directions. I don’t blame him for moving on to the next report.

Let’s see how Reddit responded.

This person knows this situation all too well.

Another person blames the project manager.

Another person offers advice.

It can be really frustrating to ask for specific information and basically have your request ignored. At least OP had everything in writing so he could refer back to the emails when they complained.

It doesn’t help that he was on a time crunch. It’s not like he had all the time in the world. He was trying to be efficient.

Following directions isn’t that hard.