I found things go much better for me when I can work on a project on my own, then if it works well, show it off and let it go up the chain. I can then focus on the work, pivot as needed, or scrap the idea if it didn’t pan out.
A co-worker of mine had an idea recently (not AI related). He told our manager and sr director about it. I think now it’s gone up to the VP level. The whole project hinges on a very specific thing working that some other team needs to do with a vendor tool and is having a lot of trouble actually getting right. Meanwhile, he’s now been asked to make multiple presentations to justify and defend it, and there are 2 or 3 separate project managers trying to track it, each with their own set of weekly meetings, tracking spreadsheet, and other such things. All those PMs are also asking for timelines and dates for a lot of unknown unknowns. All our time is being engulfed by ceremony and bureaucracy, and we don’t even know if it will work yet. If that one piece doesn’t pan out, it will be a very public failure and we’ll then be expected to come up with some other option. My part of it also involves a vendor tool. When I POC’d my part, it worked fine. When I went to set it up with some real data later, the tool isn’t working, despite the POC still running and updating fine. I can’t even replicate the POC again, but it might randomly work next week. There are bugs in systems I don’t control. It’s not a total deal breaker, but it’s a risk and may require a pivot that would fundamentally change how parts of it work that have already been presented.
Had he waited a bit to see if it will actually work, it would be no big deal and wouldn’t have cost us much time. Instead, if the vendor tool falls through, or we need to pivot to work around a bug, we now need to show that to all these people, explain why it didn’t work, and get beat up about it. We also need to pretend to be busy with this and make progress on it, when we’re in a holding pattern waiting for our dependency that may or may not work. We also found out this week that if someone on that other team makes a small mistake, it wipes out everything and the house of cards crumbles. I personally think it’s a big enough risk to scrap the whole idea and find something else, but it’s too late for that now.
Of course, I tend to like to work in the background. I want the organization to function better and more smoothly. I’m not just seeking glory. I’ve still ended up being the one our team tapped when the CIO came knocking for some big project he wanted to see done quickly, despite trying to stay out of it. I don’t think anyone was jealous of me, they were all happy that they didn’t have to deal with all the uncertainty. The only good thing about that was because it was the CIO asking, it was very easy to ignore everything else and I was able to knock it out pretty fast.
Maybe you’ve worked in companies with less bureaucracy or cultures that can handle these types of projects better. For us, it feels like no good deed goes unpunished, so it’s just easier to keep your mouth shut and focus on the work until there is something actually worth showing. That is especially true for these grass roots projects vs big corporate sponsored projects that are happening no matter what.