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The curious case of the shared team inbox. Yes, monitoring that has fallen into my lap too, thanks to the ever-present staff shortage. But I can’t make head or tail of it.

Of course, I come from Eyeteeland, where service management tools are standard. Could we envisage managing a complex workload simply by replying and forwarding emails all over the place? Or assigning tasks and priorities merely by attaching colourful labels to each message?

The curious case of email threads going back months in which somebody responds, “We will do this for you,” only to never actually do it until the next time the sender enquires what happened to it, at which point they’re told the same thing, but the work is still not done.

In my frustrated stupidity, seeing all of this shortly after joining the team, I took ownership of a whole spate of them, and now I’m stuck with them on top of all that I’m really meant to be doing. Though I’ve since developed new processes to be employed by the team for future requests, that doesn’t help with the almighty backlog.

Every time I return to the inbox to take stock of what’s new, my frustrations hit a whole new level. How can any team work this way, responding so haphazardly to every request, with no clear prioritisation, no record of action and no effort to bring about positive change? To be sure, I can’t work this way.

Ultimately we will need some manner of service management tool, be that Teamwork, Jira or some home-brew concoction hacking Outlook and Planner with Power Automate. We can’t go on with such a random approach to work, with zero accountability, whether to each other or to our customers.

Once more I must remind myself why I wanted to join this disaster of a team. Not because I’m a glutton for punishment and wanted to hang out with the unpopular tribe. No, because I was just so frustrated sitting on the other side of the fence that no progress was ever made, that I thought the only way to effect change was to move in and work amongst them.

Daily, I wonder if that was a mistake. Perhaps I should have been content with the quieter life over the road, and not let those frustrations bother me so much. I could just have carried on doing my own work, as I have always done, and left this team to their own devices. If only it were so simple. No, but we have obligations to meet as an organisation, and no amount of burying our heads in the sand will make them go away.

So here I am in the thick of it, scratching my head once more. How am I going to fix this? How are we ever going to get to a better place? But more immediately, how will we ever close off these months-long threads, still seeking redress after all this time? Ah, well the answer to that one is easy: here begins the evening shift on the mailbox.