Work Rant..... again

As most of you know, I've been assigned to a job that requires me to be at client's office for almost 2 months straight. I don't have much to complain about that but I would like to complain about a certain "colleague" that I have to work with on this engagement. The colleague in question is a senior from a different department that I have to work with. I have to say that this "senior" lets name him A isn't impressing me at all.

In my own opinion, I feel that he isn't a person that uses much common sense or does too much thinking on his own. From the moment he decided to use his approach for the engagement, I already thought to myself that there's definitely a much better way to accomplish things but he prefers to use his way which to me is a waste of time. I did suggest my way which I felt was a better approach but he chose his own approach. Due to that, I told my colleague from the same department (S) that to counter that we should work smarter to overcome the disadvantages of his approach and I'm glad that my direct colleague is being smart about it.

Anyway, there are many other things that cause me to be displeased with his work. He seems to bully his own junior as well as S whenever I'm not around. He just doesn't seem to take much responsibility in the workload. All he is doing is planning our meetings & walkthroughs with the clients. His planning of meetings and walkthroughs are not very good as well because the clients don't seem to know a single thing when we meet up with them. I think he should plan it better by giving a simple explanation to the client on what is expected of them during the discussion with us. I don't know how many meetings and walkthroughs have we gone through with the client not knowing a single thing.

Besides that, during our meetings; he asks stupid and redundant questions. I really feel that he doesn't know how to communicate with the clients properly. He starts by asking the client "What is it you actually do?" or "Why don't you tell us what you do daily?" All the while I'm like thinking "WTH?!?!?! Where got people ask like that wan?!?!?" There were cases when "we" were sounded by the client for asking stupid questions (we = him). I just think that he's totally unprofessional while dealing with clients. In addition to that, he doesn't seem to use his common sense or think about what the client says before asking the next question. Its like he has a template of questions in his brain and he just follows the template blindly.

During walkthrough meetings, he goes in unprepared and always expects us to sit next to the client so that we'll do most of the work. The last walkthrough meeting the feedback we got from the client was "Hah?!?! You all need screen shots ah?!?! Why didn't say earlier?!?! I can allocate more time for you then!!!" In my mind I was thinking.... "Sigh.... never even tell the client anything" With the client next to us, he was persistantly asking/requesting S and I to sit next to the client but the both of us refused and "encouraged" him to sit instead. The response we got was "You all sit lah... since you all will be doing the process flow." I was like "WTF?!?!?!?! Since when!?!??!" So the both of us just ignored him and "forced" him to sit down.

In conclusion, I don't care about how he does his work because I don't think he is a good staff at all. So I told S that we should just focus more on our part to ensure that we do our part properly and timely. In addition to that, I plan to ask the engagement team to meet once a week to discuss both department's work performed so that we can compile our work together. I don't feel comfortable giving A too much freedom to work with. Honestly, if his assistant manager or our partner asks me how I think he is, I might tell the truth and inform them of his imcompetence although I'd phrase it in a better way.