My workplace has started an initiative to make all public-facing documents and pages accessible. That's all well and great, but unfortunately they did not provide any training to staff, and told us that we had to get our areas tested and any issues submitted either to our local developers or our software provider by a certain date.
I just got off a video meeting with my boss and the developer assigned to an issue I submitted, and I fumbled my way through the whole thing. We're fairly busy right now with regular system testing and other projects, and the "on high" leadership who decided to make this a thing have basically provided nothing to help us. I'm so frustrated, as there are deadlines approaching to get this all done, and no one on my team has any idea what we're doing.
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Have you communicated this reality to the right people?
Oh, I was pretty vocal about it in a large team meeting. Several people spoke up and sided with me, but it's more a question of resources. Always the 'do more with less' mentality. I doubt we're going to get any additional help, for a while anyway.
It sounds like an unhealthy workplace.
Eh, I work for a large university. We're pretty much working all the time on "do more with less", so it's nothing new!
That must be the mantra on the fiat standard.
Take it from me, you need far less direction than you think you do to make the right decisions, especially at a public higher-ed institution. Just do what you believe to be the best decisions, keep your boss and others who are potentially impacted of what you’re going to do, do it, and then report. Not easy, but you’ll be fine. And when the deadlines can’t be met, communicate why as soon as you know.
Higher-ed leadership tends to cow-tow to strong leadership at the lower ranks because they’re not used to principled people making decisions without sign-offs from a VP and a committee and three blue-haired weirdos.
