You must have played ping pong on TT table but have you played or seen ping pong on IT table? Those who are working in IT organizations may have seen this or may be even played this game.
In this game everybody try to pass the ball in other’s court just like as a real ping pong game. We all want to stay away from politics but if we just brush off the dust than you will find that we all are part of politics in same manner, may be intentionally or unintentionally.
Let’s take this game in form of a conversation between Company X, Y and Z from India, Belgium and Sweden respectively who are collaboratively working for a product where company Y is the boss/client of company X and company Z. Employee A, B and C are working for Company X,Y and Z respectively.
B@Y: Hello Gentleman, I hope everybody is in this conference to start this status meeting for the progress and updates of product “Atlantis”.
B@Y: We have observed that in past few weeks performance of product “Atlantis” get degraded, do you guys have any inputs on this. (Service)
C@Z: Yes, we have also observed this. May be this is due to the latest changes in the software from X. (Ping towards A)
Now A@X has to Pong on this to save his ass,he said:-
A@X: C, why do you think so? The changes in our software were made according to specification of your software, if your software is not taking these changes which are although suggested by you than what can we do in this and as we know, in the latest release the major changes were in your software so might be some change is leaking to degrade the performance. (Pong towards C).
B@Y: C, A got a point, will you ask your team take a look again the changes made for this release? A please ask your team also to review the changes at their side once again.
A got first point here.
B@Y: Let’s move on to the issue18765, C, this issue was identified at your end so what is the progress on this? (Service).
This is an ace for C and they have nothing to ping on this so again A got another point.
C@Z: We are still looking in to it, we are not able to reproduce this issue till now, as soon as we reproduce this we will have a fix.
B@Y: I am looking at issue56781. A, what is the status of this? (Service).
A@X: We have the fix of this issue but we need some inputs from dev team at Z to make the fix more robust. (Ping towards C).
C@Z: A, we have already provided some inputs on this as requested by your team, do you need more inputs? (Pong towards A).
A@X: Well, I will check with my team. (Point goes to C)
B@Y: A, we need this fix ASAP so please check this with your team.
Score up till now A on 2 and C on 1. B@Y played few more services and score was A on 4 and C on 4.
B@Y: As I mentioned in the email which I sent on last week Friday, we need functionality 10 in the upcoming release, Have you both discussed it with each other? (Service ).
A@X: Yes B, we have internally reviewed the requirements and we also sent some requirements of our software to dev team at Z to integrate functionality 10. Now we are waiting for information from Z so that we can move on. (Ping towards C).
A got the point but suddenly C ponged
C@Z:A, to provide that information we need high level logic of your software. We need to better understand how your software is working than only we will be able to provide that information as both software are tightly coupled with each other to achieve functionality 10.
and C got the point and game got deuce here.
B@Y: A, please first provide the required high level logic of your software to C.
C get advantage.
A@X: B, it’s not possible, those documents are under NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement).
game again got deuce.
B@Y: C, as A mentioned that these docs are under NDA so I need to discuss this matter with higher management and then I will let you know about the availability of these documents.
B@Y: Okay Guys we are going good here so let us meet again next week at same time.
What happened above is just ping pong of things between two parties while one party is acting as mediator. No one won the game and at the end all things were good.These things happens when ping pong is played on IT table.
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