Leveraging Other Minions - Share the Pain

Misery Loves Company

So far you've been working towards maximizing your own failure. Great job! But why are you so self-absorbed? It's time to share the feeling. How? Simple. Just remember this simple truth:

Your lack of planning CAN be someone else's emergency!

A lot of someone's in fact. You're lack of planning can be like a terrible disease consuming the time of your most in-demand co-workers when they are at their busiest. This will likely cause pain for every other team they service. And possibly their friends and families.

A mad scramble can ensue. The classic firefighting scenario for IT is so famous. You can picture it - the war room, the late night conference calls, and the manager level emails.

The key to this circle of success is to only leverage key resources at the very last minute. Bonus points if you communicate using the wrong channels and supply insufficient information.

Example:
Send an email to the infrastructure team that you need a bunch of new servers. CC all managers. Be sure to leave out all relevant information such as when the servers need to be delivered, what resources they should have, or that you've left this request until the last minute and that this relates to a critical deliverable.

The infrastructure team probably have an queue or ticketing system which is regularly monitored and which helps people include the critical information they need to complete requests. But that channel is not for you. You email directly to that guy you know that happens to be away for a week.