I am working on a project proposal at the moment. It’s a bit like a marriage proposal, but with less chance for regret down the line.
It’s a rather hefty undertaking and the person leading the team is one of your stereotypical pie-chart wielding financial experts – although I use the term “expert” rather loosely here. Actually, “leading” also requires some poetic license.
Midway through the process, he instructed us all to use the same template to format our input to the proposal document. This seemed entirely sensible until we discovered that the “document” we had to use was actually a PowerPoint presentation.
I’m just going to let that sink in for a bit.
Once our ghasts stopped flabbering, we made repeated requests to Mr Experty the expert to switch to a more appropriate format. Clearly the man went to the Grumpycat School of Management, because all we got was a whole bag of no. Even when we prepared a Word document that duplicated the look and feel of his PowerPoint template exactly, he wouldn’t budge. We finally had to bite the bullet and commence with the unutterably laborious process of cut ‘n’ paste to shoehorn roughly a hundred pages of information into a series of slightly misaligned text boxes.
I’m guessing that Mr Experty has spent his entire working life making bullet-pointed lists and isn’t prepared to admit that he is confounded by the intricacies of other business software. Also, he is an imbecile.
