Ineffective communication?

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I am so pissed at management! We have a department that has been deficient in their record keeping. I have been ranting about the need for this department to step it up and begin testing and keeping records of the testing for the past few years. This particular dept had been an area of special training and knowledge for me in a previous life. Well yesterday our customer ambushed us with a surprise audit, really it was a plant tour that somehow turned into an audit. Every department failed because of lax record keeping. This failure places us at risk of losing one of our biggest customers. Needless to say everybody is scrambling to correct all deficiencies. What pisses me off is that teams have been formed and nobody recognized my previous concerns or included me in any of the teams. It's like they just blew off everything that I had been saying, or that I had ever said it. Why communicate at all? Screw them, time to double down on the details of my job tasks and let them fend for themselves.

This is either a wake up call and the future is a bright one or like you say it is time to get out.

Use your gut instinct and if exiting the company is hot gossip at the moment better to follow the pack than to stay aboard a sinking ship.

So, this is just a question... but is there any possibility that the way you have been communicating is the problem? I realize you are venting here, but you said you've "been ranting." Literally?

There is a guy at my work who rants about everything. Even though he has some good points people just don't bother listening to the guy, because he is a pain in the ass, and is generally just too extreme in his views. If he was calmer, more reasoned and balanced, more polite, listened, and gave suggestions instead of just complaints, I'm sure he would get further.

If you want to be on this new team, an option you could try is going to the team leader, saying you would really like to do it, give some examples of your ideas to fix the problem, acknowledge that you can be overbearing (if true), apologize for your past behaviour (if you were a dick), and promise to play nice and listen to other people.

No Ana6,
I have not literally been ranting and it is not possible to get on any of these teams because they are seen as being at a higher level than my position. After a few years with the company it seems that I am still seen somewhat as an outsider. The situation is such that if my expertise was color and the company became focused on color everybody but myself would be asked about that. For example I could offer my factual opinion that the sky was blue and my supervisor would consult with the programming dept if it were indeed so. The next level of management is ownership level and I don't want to go there yet. My manager is the most incompetent paper pusher there is and right now my job is to support him where asked (I have offered many times) and double down on my specific duties while this is going on. Any input on my part now is seen as a challenge to knowledge and authority, although this will not be recognized. I have acknowledged in the past that I can be too direct, black and white and I do play nice. (My position is such that I pretty much have some contact with most everybody in the company on a regular, sometimes daily basis.)

As an example one of our processes has been called into question. It is supposedly new technology and better than the mainstream process. I did offer my expertise in this area and found that there are documentation issues with this new "technology". Both myself and my supervisor were present when I asked the representative of this technology directly if it meets any widely recognized standards. He went around the question, our current crop of American politicians would have been proud of him. After the meeting I spoke with my supervisor about how he did not answer this question and supervisor was nonresponsive.

At first I thought that communication was an issue on my side only, now I see that it is only part of the whole. At work there is the authority thing (my supervisor writes using the words shall and declare!), then there is the knowledge (if the person is not in the "right " position they cannot have knowledge) and then there is the politics. *&^%, no wonder I am exhausted at the end of the day.

The only success I've ever had in convincing management on ideas is to write up a proposal with something that'll convince them (usually something that'll either MAKE money,SAVE money, or protect the company... they don't care about much else.) A full proposal, not just an email.

But they also don't like it when upstart peons come up with better ideas than themselves or their "trusted sources"... but it's worth a shot. Saving the company may at least save your job. [shrug]

Good luck!