"LuAnn" (Supplementary Letter)

Note: Main subject's name changed.  This letter is referenced by one to follow.

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Emailed: Tuesday, April 8, 2015

Dear Lynn,

It's been a pleasure working on-site with Reed and DJ,  a privilege to work with Joe and Farin on 1st & Stewart, and I couldn't have chosen better teammates than James and Josee.  That makes this difficult, but in light of a more lucrative offer from a different division of my former employer of 10+ years, I won't be returning to Holmes after my planned trip to Mexico.

Holmes is a respectable company and I wish you the best.  The CAD department, however, is the most inefficient and mismanaged entity that I have ever worked for.  LuAnn is a great conversationalist and has a heart of gold the size of Texas, but the size of the chip on her shoulder rivals it.  Her organization and leadership skills are deplorable.

I received no structured training regarding the trade, workflow, or even the organizational structure of the company.  Lynda.com and Google taught me more than LuAnn did.  When it comes to communication, LuAnn wants everything to be channeled through her, which means it often gets lost in her inbox and falls through the cracks.  PMs and PEs seem to avoid her when possible.  I had to do some sleuthing behind her back just to learn that Joe and Farin were the PM and PE working on 1st & Stewart, essentially forcing my way into the communication circle.  I had no contact with Reed within the three months that I worked on the job prior to moving on-site.  I was never given the contacts of representatives of other trades to coordinate with, or brought along to a single meeting.

I burned more than three weeks of time just adding feeders to the power drawings, as LuAnn would give vague direction and then change her mind, or realize that she overlooked a game-changing piece of the puzzle.  During that time I felt so bad about charging all of that time to our customer that I began entering the time spent fixing our own mistakes as “corporate administrative” on my timesheet, since the wasted hours were obviously the result of our own inefficiencies.  The task should have taken 1/3 of the time, done right the first time.  When I told LuAnn about this, she said that all time from that point onward should be charged to the job, needless or otherwise.

I would like to have learned the fundamentals of the trade in a structured way, and then taken on more responsibility.  Instead, I was tossed into the half-baked 1st & Stewart BIM model, where I knew enough to realize that a lot had been done wrong, but not enough to make it right without some direction.  The extent of my training from that point on consisted of me diplomatically pointing out things that were obviously done wrong and asking LuAnn how to fix them (when she was available) only to be met with the interrogative defensiveness that makes her so difficult to approach regarding anything job-related.

You can't tell LuAnn that she's wrong, or that there is a better way.  It's always the computer's fault, Shunfa's fault, or the fault of the last outside consultant who came in to try and make the network more efficient.  I even heard her reference us "newbies" as an excuse regarding something she'd goofed up herself during one of her Go-To meetings regarding the BIM model.  I will doubtlessly be cited as a scapegoat within the next month or so.  When you hear it, I hope you realize that it probably isn't/wasn't me.  Please consider the turnover in the CAD department.  It is understandable why previous hires have come, floundered, and gone. 

I apologize for not giving more than a week's notice, but with the trip to Mexico that has been planned since before I was hired by Holmes, resulting in almost a week of unpaid leave, I couldn't afford to risk being told to pack up and go home "today."  I won’t be putting any time on my sheet for today, and will leave my gate key on my desk. 

I’ve never thrown anyone under the bus like this, but this “bus” has been an elephant in the room at Holmes for some time now, and I hope my exit helps paves the way for something to be done about her, for the sake of the rest of the team.

Sincerely,

Daniel Loffer

BIM/CAD Tech

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