Technology Transfer and "Customer" management

So, again today I get a call from a tech transfer office where they are calling "to find the right person". The funny part about this call is that I am in the middle of a medium sized deal with them. The person calling, it turns out, reports to the person with whom I am speaking to almost every day. She didn't know that anyone from her office was dealing with our company at all and got to me by generically asking for "business development" as it came through the operator.

There are only 7 people in her office....AWESOME coordination!

If I hear anyone at the next AUTM meetings complain about not knowing who to call I will so want to bring up this story. I won't, because I would have to name names and someone might have read this and put 2 and 2 together. This is about the third time this has gone on, so not isolated to this one office. Everytime I am a little blown away as it seems to happen in smaller offices more than it happens in the bigger offices (Stanford, MIT etc...).

From the bigger offices, it appears to me that I get assigned a case manager, as all emails come from one person but when I start to ask questions they sometimes punt me to another person. The one person see's all the contact, but only handles some of the technology. This makes a lot of sense to me, so whether or not this is what they are doing it is the way it looks and it works. Would love to hear how it really happens, but am too lazy to ask. As long as it works I don't care that much!

When this happens to us, where I drop the ball and don't realize what the right hand is doing (assuming I am the left hand) we work pretty hard and quickly to figure out what went wrong. Normally the problem is the seperation of continents and I was out of date by a few days with what someone on a different continent was doing. We knash our teeth a bit and figure out why systems in place to deal with this didn't work and why one or the other of us got caught looking dumb.

That's just business 101.