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How should I have reacted to an intern's work?
As a background on me, I'm going on 40 years into my engineering based career and have developed tools and methodologies to assist me in completing projects. So I have seen a fair amount of issues come and go, and am considered a bit of a senior SME. My current project is a re-write of 7 systems that are nominally identical, and when I started on this project last November I ran one of my custom tools over all the systems and showed that none of them were identical, and that within them were two main groupings where there was a group of 4 and and another group of 3 systems that were more aligned to each other. When I created this data I passed it onto my PM pointing out how this will affect moving forward with development. Fast forward to last week. A meeting was scheduled to discuss current risk factors for the project and how to get past them. One of the agenda points was the differences between the original 7 systems. The meeting was for me, my PM, plus another PM assisting my PM, and I also noted an intern was added to the meeting. I'd never heard of this intern before, let alone interacted with him and assumed he was simply being pulled in to observe the meeting. Come the day of the meeting and I was blindsided by the fact that the intern was actually presenting his analysis of the 7 systems, and how that he discovered there seemed to be groupings of 4 and 3 systems. I was sort of stunned by this (it was not on the agenda), skipped a beat and sort of continued on with the meeting acting almost as if I'm ignoring this intern and his work. I've also not spoken or interacted with this intern since the meeting, nor discussed it with my PM. In hindsight I'm feeling bad about my behavior as I feel like I disrespected him and his work1. But I also don't know who directed him to do this work, or why it was done (and if asked I could have pointed out a ton of intern friendly work that really would have helped me out). I also have this gut feeling that intern now could think I'm not a nice person for the way that I reacted. How should I have better reacted to the intern's presentation given that it duplicated my prior work, and which should have also been known to my PM? 1. I'm not dumping on the poor intern for the actual work he did. He did what he was told to do and made a very reasonable attempt at analysis without apparently knowing of the tools that I previously used, nor the results I previously generated.
As a background on me, I'm going on 40 years into my engineering based career and have developed tools and methodologies to assist me in completing projects. So I have seen a fair amount of issues come and go, and am considered a bit of a senior SME.
My current project is a re-write of 7 systems that are nominally identical, and when I started on this project last November I ran one of my custom tools over all the systems and showed that none of them were identical, and that within them were two main groupings where there was a group of 4 and and another group of 3 systems that were more aligned to each other. When I created this data I passed it onto my PM pointing out how this will affect moving forward with development.
Fast forward to last week. A meeting was scheduled to discuss current risk factors for the project and how to get past them. One of the agenda points was the differences between the original 7 systems. The meeting was for me, my PM, plus another PM assisting my PM, and I also noted an intern was added to the meeting. I'd never heard of this intern before, let alone interacted with him and assumed he was simply being pulled in to observe the meeting.
Come the day of the meeting and I was blindsided by the fact that the intern was actually presenting his analysis of the 7 systems, and how that he discovered there seemed to be groupings of 4 and 3 systems. I was sort of stunned by this (it was not on the agenda), skipped a beat and sort of continued on with the meeting acting almost as if I'm ignoring this intern and his work. I've also not spoken or interacted with this intern since the meeting, nor discussed it with my PM.
In hindsight I'm feeling bad about my behavior as I feel like I disrespected him and his work1. But I also don't know who directed him to do this work, or why it was done (and if asked I could have pointed out a ton of intern friendly work that really would have helped me out). I also have this gut feeling that intern now could think I'm not a nice person for the way that I reacted.
How should I have better reacted to the intern's presentation given that it duplicated my prior work, and which should have also been known to my PM?
1. I'm not dumping on the poor intern for the actual work he did. He did what he was told to do and made a very reasonable attempt at analysis without apparently knowing of the tools that I previously used, nor the results I previously generated.
