Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

Perhaps I am infectiously obnoxious. I was in a meeting this morning with a powerpoint presentation being shared of the web. The first slide read:

Project Support Team/Knowledge Transfer Team: Here to Help

I have infected more people with my catch phrase! *evil laugh* Once upon a time, I was between jobs. Since I was just job hunting and such, I saw lots of friends and showed up to many calls for assistance. My first statement upon arriving at a move, pre-party prep session, gardening day, etc. was, “I’m here to help.” After dropping a big box of books on my foot, “I’m here to help.” After teasing someone mercilessly about something silly, “I’m here to help, but I didn’t necessarily say whom I was here to help!” In a short time, my friends and family realized that I was trekking around for my own amusement and that accepting my “help” had a certain amount of risk associated with it since ultimately I was there for my own amusement.

When I did take a new job, it was a support management position so of course, “I’m here to help” stayed in my idiolect. No surprise, sarcasm crept into my delivery of the catch phrase and stayed there. When I changed jobs again, the sarcasm ebbed a bit and the genuine helpfulness returned. Of course, I quickly found myself in need of more help than I could give on the Project of Doom. The catch phrase fell out of my professional idiolect until the Project of Doom completed and I got assigned to the PST/KTT referenced above.

The team was new and still defining itself. In fact, I had a hard time figuring out what the boundaries were for our duties when supporting projects. At one point I turned to my boss and said, “So we’re here to help?” She said, “Exactly.” As things got entertainingly crazy, I repeated “Here to help” as a mantra. The problem with a loosely defined purpose is that it’s easy to get dragged in deeper and deeper until support becomes serious hand-holding. “We’re here to help” continued to accurately define our role even if we did say it sarcastically sometimes. My boss even queues me to say it during meetings team meetings. I tell my project managers that I support that I’m here to help them with anything I can.

Well, clearly it caught on. Some of the mischievous sense of the phrase has remained as well as the sense of “I didn’t say whom I was here to help.” Our team serves many different groups and organizations and juggles a lot of different best interests. The nice part is that we really are here to help. It’s a simple, straight-forward nice way of summing up what we do. Sure, sometimes we run around doing silly little things no one else has time for. Other times we dive far deeper into the data than anyone else. But it’s all encompassed by “Here to Help” and we’re communicating that mission loud and clear.

The photograph of the mossy rock is actually the top of the stone wall around the nearby graveyard. Click for a larger version - the focus is quite narrow/short and the effect is kind of neat.

tags: communication, here to help, moss, project management, rocks, support, work