Dealing With Minor Sabotage And Annoying Snipers At Work

Lately at work, my team has had to interact with individuals who are bitterly clinging to the hope that our organization will shell out huge dollars for a SharePoint instance. Looking through our server logs, we've found that none of the MSFT partisans have used our existing intranet tools - blogs, wiki, social networking, etc. On top of that, none of them could write a line of code if you held a gun to their heads.

They're ignorant, intolerant, aggressive and quite vocal. They are also a small minority. Our stats show massive use of our products, continual growth and declining trouble ticket generation. Despite this, some of our leadership is marginally in their camp and has encouraged their agitations by commissioning a team of them to do an Analysis of Alternatives (AoA).

The AoA is a total waste of time. We've got nothing like the kind of money necessary to roll out SharePoint even if it did provide something of value, which the growing AoA tables and charts are showing it does not. The SP partisans aren't any better at business case analysis than they are at HTML or PHP and so they fight on, using any tool that comes to hand to make their case. The result is days like yesterday where a colleague and I had to spend an hour in someone's office defending Google search as a method to find things. He then went on to another hour of a leadership meeting under even worse conditions.

You heard me right, they question the value of Google search.

Rather than enduring this any longer and then boozing it up when I get home to deal with the unvented anger, I sat outside last night with a (small) glass of wine and mused.

The thing to realize is that no matter how complicated things are, there are only a small, finite number of actual issues. I can't find things with Google search, the sites don't have a common look and feel, wiki is an unfamiliar technology and I live a sad and lonely life and hope that MSFT can find me a date.

It's hard to do, but to counter this kind of slander, you've got to separate your emotions from the attacks and develop a sound counter-argument to each one. Those counter-arguments need to be memorized and trotted out every time the snarling starts. You've got to program yourself to robotically spew forth the logic and data that led you to the decisions you made. While they're waving their arms and raging or smirking and taking pot shots, you need to remain calm and detached, slaying each in turn with minimal effort and no venom.

Without a canned, prepared response to each attack, you're just playing a particularly unpleasant game of whack-a-mole.

DO NOT WANT.