Not Having A Good Week

I am a lousy manager. Put me in charge of other people's work and 9 times out of 10, what will happen is that they will either not do the job or do it very badly. In both cases, I'll get stuck doing it in their stead.

I've been given 3 shots at management so far with 3 different teams. And every single time, at least one member of staff has done this to me. If I'm not stuck writing the press releases the PR guy didn't get to, then I'm wasting an entire week of work digging through Excel worksheet after Excel worksheet in an effort to make sense of the so-called cost analysis and revenue projections prepared by the so-called financial analyst who just happened to omit to define his freaking variables, assumptions and just about anything else that would have made this stuff in the least bit comprehensive to human beings. The stuff I did manage to figure out was so full of mistakes, in the end I decided not to bother and just re-did the whole thing.

The worst part is when you're doing something that is outside your field, it takes you FOREVER. The work it would have taken him a day to do if he'd ever bothered to put in the effort or the hours, took me a whole week. And even then, I doubt that it's as good as what he could have come up with. I've had to 'dumb down' a lot of the analysis simply because I don't understand the financial issues involved and I don't have time to research them. This is not the in-depth analysis people hire consultants to do and I'm sure this client will say so.

I don't have the budget to pay for someone else's time to do it properly. So what to do? Send it to Ernst and Younge at my own expense? Leave everything else and spend all my time on it?