So, you want to know about Rob Finlay, eh? Or at least, what I remember, or rather, what I tried to make work from his whole deal. It wasn’t Rob Finlay the man, not for me anyway. It was the “Finlay Method,” or some fancy name like that, which landed on our department like a sack of potatoes one Monday morning.
The Big “Finlay” Idea Drops
I remember my manager, good old Dave, looking like he’d seen a ghost. He called us into the stuffy meeting room, the one with the flickering fluorescent light. He said corporate had hired this big-shot consultant, Rob Finlay, and we were all going to revolutionize how we did, well, everything. My first thought? “Oh, here we go again.” You know the drill. Another flavor-of-the-month management craze.
The core of it, as far as I could make out from the glossy brochures and the mandatory two-hour webinar, was something about “synergistic flow” and “dynamic resource allocation.” Sounded impressive, didn’t it? What it boiled down to, for us on the ground, was a whole lot of new forms and tracking.
- We had to log every task, no matter how small.
- Estimate time for things that were impossible to estimate.
- Attend daily “synergy huddles” which were just longer meetings.
The promise was more efficiency, less waste. The reality, well, that was a different story.
My Grind with the “Finlay Way”
So, I got to work. Or rather, I tried to get my actual work done while also doing the “Finlay Way.” My main job at the time was coordinating project timelines. Pretty straightforward, usually. But now? I spent half my day filling out these new “Finlay Projection Sheets.” I had to break down every tiny step. “Open email – 0.5 minutes.” “Read email – 2 minutes.” “Think about email – 5 minutes.” It was nuts.
I remember one project, a pretty urgent one. We needed to get a new product feature out. Before Finlay, we’d have a quick chat, map out the big steps, and get cracking. But now, I had to create this monstrous document detailing every conceivable micro-task for a dozen people. The team was getting antsy. They wanted to build, to create, not to sit there while I asked them how many minutes it would take to rename a variable.
We tried to make it work, honestly. We held the huddles. We filled the forms. But the “synergistic flow” felt more like wading through treacle. We were so busy tracking the work, we were barely doing the work. I’d see folks just staring at their screens, probably trying to figure out how to log “staring at screen trying to figure out Finlay forms” without sounding like a slacker.
What Happened Next? Well…
Did it revolutionize us? Ha! Not a chance. After about six months, the Finlay buzz started to fade. The forms got filled out less and less. The synergy huddles became bi-weekly, then monthly, then just… stopped. No big announcement. It just sort of fizzled out, like a damp firework. I heard Rob Finlay himself had moved on to “synergize” some other unsuspecting company.
The funny thing is, some of the tracking stuck around, the bits that actually made a tiny bit of sense, but mostly, we just went back to how we did things before, maybe a little wiser, definitely more cynical. We lost a good few months of real productivity, though. That’s the bit that still irks me. We had good people, good ideas, and we were made to jump through hoops that led nowhere.
I even remember my old colleague, Sarah. Sharp as a tack, great engineer. She got so fed up with the constant pointless reporting that she just quit. Went to a smaller company where she could actually build things. Can’t say I blamed her. That was a real loss, all thanks to chasing some consultant’s pipedream.
So, That’s My Rob Finlay Story
Why am I telling you this? Because I see these patterns, you know? Every few years, there’s a new Rob Finlay, a new “revolutionary” method. Different names, different buzzwords, but often the same old story: lots of fanfare, lots of disruption, very little actual, lasting improvement.
My takeaway from the whole Finlay fiasco? Focus on the basics. Communicate clearly. Trust your team. And be very, very skeptical of anyone promising to solve all your problems with a new set of forms. It rarely works out that way. You just gotta keep your head down sometimes and do the real work, despite all the noise. That’s what I learned to do, anyway.