You Want Your Money? Come and Fight for It!

It's that time of the year again. As the company I'm working in just passed the 2nd quarter of our financial year, we are to prepare our maintenance budget for the next financial year. Basically we'll have our internal sits between supervisors of that particular section, discuss what our requirements are, undergo a series of review, scrutinizing, and challenge by the top management before the budget got sanctioned. All sections have finished consolidating our prepared budget, and we had an away day (2 days technically) at one of the hotels in Malacca, basically to go through everything all of us have prepared, and starts the bashing and questioning session. If you've never been through one of these reviews, trust me; it's brutal. You need to get your facts right, supporting information, and hell lots of moral support. To make things worse, other sections were represented by their managers, planners and supervisors, while I was all alone (my boss was away for a conference). It was ugly. The session was attended by all head of departments and head planners of each discipline, but the main cast of the bashers consist of the GM of Engineering, the principal engineer for Mechanical - Rotating, and last but not least, the Head of the Reliability unit. They'll look at this year's budget, year to date expenditure (to see how well you're doing), your expectations for next year, and hell lots of reasons as to why you're asking for more. We were there from 8am till 9pm for two straight days, and heck, it is not over yet! Another session has to be set. I'm mentally exhausted in the end of the day, and my section's department got slashed by about 40%. I just could not present my case better. It's just like a court battle. Who says being an engineer does not require you to act like a lawyer? Till the next post...

Oh yeah, btw we're also stressed out as we have to prepare our mid year review on our performance appraisal. I need to take a step back, review my KPIs have basically, try to 'sell' myself of my performance.....