Uricon, and on...
[home] [classic] [simon poetry] [simon prose] [pat] [history] [groups/links\competitions]

Bastard PeoplePerson From Hell #6: Return on Investment

BPFH No. 6 - Return on Investment

It seems like a tactically sound decision.  The users want you to do something of real value instead of copying random reports and regurgitating them with new headings and a few columns replaced.  Or creating a complex query that requires three clicks to put together (Open, select old query, save as new query).  And if you make the naming convention something like BPFHRCFRN1DNU-001FGM (Bastard Peopleperson From Hell's Report Copied From Report Number 1 Doing Nothing Useful -001 For Good Measure) then nobody has a cat in hell mewling "Violin strings, get your violin strings here”s chance of knowing where anything is.

So, users say "Okay, we would like to fax and email our purchase orders, and start making use of this workflow thing".  Aaaargh. The only consolation is that Work Flow is likely to be looked at, considered carefully, developed for eighteen months, and then discarded because somebody said that "Lotus Notes is really good at that sort of thing" during an alcohol-binge-break at some Free Executive's World Cruise for Board Members of companies with money to burn only, just don't ask how the costs get met.

Anyway, for such momentous projects, it's obvious that you're going to be a bit stretched, such that your attention may wander long enough for the users to notice that system performance actually improves whilst you're distracted with other things.  Which means they might just send you more work!

So obviously it's time to bring in the contractors.  The conversation with your manager goes something like this:-

"John," (this may be his name, if it was worth remembering. Otherwise, you can cover your ignorance by putting on a Cockney accent).

"John.  This Project looks like a big 'un.  I imagine it's got board-level approval, being so important and everything.  I mean, not that we'll need contractors or anything.  We're quite competent enough.  And of course, the size of your budget bears no resemblance to the size of your manhood.  Just because we can't afford any contractors, which of course we don't need, because everybody - especially the other senior managers - knows that we don't really do the big, important, projects...." and so on, and so forth.

The reasoning is, of course, that the contractors can get on with the really useful stuff, and when it doesn't work because they lose interest after two weeks of being unable to gather specifications from managers in the business that really need the results yesterday, but are consequently too busy managing to manage the organization of a meeting to  start to think about the meaning of the request they made in the corridor three months ago which they forgot five minutes later anyway, and that is now having a budget of a quarter-of-a-million pounds thrown at it in a mad attempt to work out why it sounds just so damned useful, despite nobody really knowing what it means or what tangible benefits it will bring.  Other than the random graphs produced by the ruffled IT manager, who knows that six 3D bar graphs showing low at the 'today' position and 'high' at the tomorrow position (or even better, a scatter graph with four 'usefulness' zones, into which our projects magically appear in the "how did we survive without it?" zone) is worth more than a hundred words, even if those words are all less than three syllables... when this fails to produce anything resembling a specification, they all give up and play on the internet for three months anyway.

Today, we all think that specifications are so passé - we go in for extreme programming which means doubling the number of programmers so that pairs of expensive ignorant people can convince each other that using an XML parsing and distribution engine costing 300k+ is the best way of copying an address from a postcode table into a few fields.

Of course, spending half-a-million on such a strategically important project is hard to justify to the board, but we managed to get approved a 450k feasibility study that will explore every avenue, climb every mountain, nuzzle every orifice etc. etc. utilising a number of other consultants who seem to supply us with a large number of comparative product graphs that look suspiciously like report BPFHRCFRN1DNU-001FGM.  The result being that the board hear from a few people with nice suits and teeth fused into two thin sheets, who have no knowledge nor interest in the company (but a vested interest in finding quaint bizarre new seas to swim, tummies to rumble, horses to...)

... whose summary paper they copy and paste from your original recommendation document anyway. It just has more terms like 'ROI' (Who cares what the Irish think about our project?) and 'Hit the ground running' and 'Balanced Scorecard' (because somebody mistakenly thought we were working on a HR project) etc.

So a million pounds later (two if you include the new server that the Unix guys managed to sneak through the back door, although it took a good chunk out of the plasterwork, and the night-porter was asking where the night went after being slipped a few roofies in his whisky stash), and we have a team of six PeopleSoft contractors, asking for specs and design docs and meetings and PCs and other unnecessary items.

Day 1, and I meet with the project manager, called Rob (who is my friend, because he has slapped me on the shoulder and laughed heartily).

We meet in the executive meeting room.

"Is there a light in here?" Rob asks.
"It's on a motion sensor. You need to wander away from the sound of my voice to set it off."

"Oh."  There's a bit of careful carpet-shuffling, and then a worried, "My feet seem to be stuck to the floor."

Epoxy by proxy. How we love thee.

"Hellooooo, " I hear as I shuffle from the store cupboard, remembering to turn the "Meeting in progress" sign around to read "Beware! Hungry Crocodiles!"

Project managers. Who'd have 'em.

I gave the reception staff a friendly wave, at which they all dived for the carpet tiles. Must be their September 11th training they did the other week.

So we arranged a project meeting between functional heads, our own programmers, Betty the sandwich lady, the key techies and functional liaisons from the contractors, and two cocktail sausages with cubes of pineapple.  Epoxy on each chair, of course.

By lunch time I was a little bored, so I drafted a memo letting our Chief Executive know that things were so efficient, that we already had a demo prepared for him, utilising the IT Director's email account of course.

I wandered into reception a little later, where the receptionists were doing little circles around some poor Asian student who mistakenly asked if this was where he could book flying lessons, the mad-eyed ladies going "hut hut hut" and brandishing sharpened pencils, which they prodded him with whenever he tried to move.

"Ladies."

"Arsehole."

Women after my own heart. I checked up on the project director, a thin pencil of light shining from reception to reveal a pair of shoes, two socks a few steps later, and Bob (my friend) flat on his back, arms glued above his head, with a rake on top of him.  "Ahhh, the oldies are the goodies," I say to myself, as I close the door, ignoring the little whimper within, peeling off the top layer of the sign to reveal the words, "Project Hardhat Demo".

As the director appeared from the lift, I deposited the remaining tubes of the epoxy on the reception desk (the rest being in the IT Director's bottom drawer), pointing it out to the fearsome females, with the suggestion that it might help them keep the intruder still until the army arrive, and stood back to watch as twenty irate people surfaced from the proper meeting room, executive leather chairs hanging from their behinds, making little leather farty noises with each step.

Time for lunch.

The project was abandoned, as was the IT Director for some unknown reason.

The ambulance crew spent a little while picking drawing pins from the back of my friend Rob, the project manager. He kept on going into shock every time I passed serenely by with a cup of tea for some reason.  Contractors. They think they're so much better than everybody else.

- Simon Huggins, 21st September 2003