I had to take a trip out of SG to perform work for a client of ours. This is a big prospective client that my company has and they wanted everything to go smoothly. However, due to a significant amount of poor planning, this project was a disaster. For context, I am an engineer working for a consulting company.
So, first off there is no kick-off meeting with the customer (just emails.) A kick-off meeting is a crucial part of getting things in order for engineering and consulting projects. In order to save time and money, however, my company likes to skip those. I did have a meeting with one of the project leads to get a scope of what I needed to do. He gave me the diagrams provided by the customer and gave me a rundown on what all needed to happen on site. He also told me it would take a day to complete the work so I should just plan for a day trip with a one-night hotel stay. And based on this, I planned for exactly that. He gave me the customer contact info to coordinate my onsite and I went from there.
Fast forward to me being on the customer site; first off as I’m pulling up I’m thinking “this place looks WAY bigger than what our diagrams have led us to believe.” Already I’m starting to feel that this is not going to go well.
I meet with my contact and we start discussing everything I need to do. This is where I find out a section of the warehouse I needed to do work in was several stories high… which when I talked to my project lead he informed me it was 1 story. There is also another section of the building I need to do work in that isn’t even in the diagrams given. I let my lead know this and I tell him I can’t finish this today, and our great office coordinators booked me a super early flight the next day so I couldn’t finish tomorrow.
He begged me to stay for another day and told me about a flight later in the day tomorrow that I would need to book myself. I was NOT about to pay $500+ for a later flight at my own expense (even though they likely would reimburse me) and also sacrifice part of my weekend. I told him no because I wasn’t given all the correct info or all the building diagrams.
Now that I’m back, I am being painted as the bad guy for not finishing out the work. I was also told I should have worked with the customer to get a better understanding of how big the building was and what they wanted me to do (by the same project lead who had a meeting with me in the first place to discuss the scope.) However, even when I reached out to the customer he took several weeks to get back to me and only told me the days I could come on site. Based on my schedule and what I was told for a time frame, I planned for one day.
Now the project might be in jeopardy and we likely will need to go on-site again to finish out the work properly. Many people at the company also seem to be disappointed and mad at me for just going home.
So, am I wrong for not staying on-site and finishing out the work even though I was misinformed