I haven't had a chance to look at this site much lately, let alone post anything since work has become amusingly high pressured lately and I just haven't had the time.
Last week, or possibly the week before last - it is all very blurred, the project manager called a meeting where he explained the latest wisdom of "The Board". "The Board" are a shadowy cabal of individuals whom we rarely see but hold our future in their hands. They are, in turn, subservient to another even more elusive and elect group calling themselves "The Venture Capitalists".
Last year one of the key systems which the business uses outlived it's support date which means that if it were ever to collapse in a burning slag heap of metal and plastic large areas of the business would be well and truly up shit creek so clearly something needed to be done. We, in the IT department, we're very keen to build a brand new system using a lot of cutting edge technology, most of which would only just be out of it's beta development phase by the time we thought we might have finished our development and The Board agreed that this sounded like a fine plan and we should go ahead, all they needed was to get the venture capitalists to allow them to spend the huge sums of money which would be required. The Venture capitalists weren't too keen on this idea since they like to see their money being spent on things which immediately make the company more profitable and the proposal in front of them would simply allow it to continue more or less as it was currently. This was not a huge obstacle since everyones intention was to first of all build all the functionality which would replace the current system and then be left with an massively extensible platform upon which it would be very easy to quickly add a lot more functionality which would immediatley and directly generate more money for The Board and The Venture Capitalists. This part was known as Phase Two but before Phase Two could happen Phase One had to be finished.
The Board decided that neither they nor we had the time to write any sort of specification for the work that was about to undertaken and, it seems to me, arbitrarily decided it would all be finished by Christmas. Some of the more optomistic characters thought it would all be done in 3 months and finished last August. As it has turned out it's taken rather longer than that since almost everyone is having to learn entirely new technologies that very few other people are actually using yet.
The project manager explained that the Venture capitalists have now lost patience and are demanding that Phase Two begins immediatley and in turn The Board are now threatening that if we aren't completely finished by April with a fully tested and working system then we are essentially all going to lose our jobs and any future IT work that needs doing will be outsourced to other companies. This is I think slightly unfair since those that are being threatened with outsourcing have had no actual input into the part of the project which went wrong; deciding how long it would take and how much money to spend on it. Luckily from what I can see we should easily be able to deliver the project by then but in the meantime there are a lot of panicky people constantly hanging about stopping people working to ask them how their work is going and I don't think threatening everyone with being outsourced, even it's not a threat and something you will actually do, is much of an incentive to anyone ! Luckily, again, everyone who's actually doing the work is so keen to finally see it all working together that you could probably threaten to have everyone shot on completion of the project and we'd still finish it just to see it working, albeit very briefly.
The most amusing thing though is how anyone, with even a moments rational thought, thinks that it's going to be easier, cheaper and more effective to manage outsourced projects being carried out by people they will never meet, who are thinking only of how much money they can extract from you and don't actually give a toss about your business than it is to manage a project that is going on one hundred yards away from your office.
The main reason this project is probably going to go down as a failure from The Boards point of view is that no one would say what they wanted in the first place, so there was no specification and that is the same reason that every other IT project they've kicked off has failed as well. I think you really need to be living in cloud cuckoo land if you imagine that going to an outsourcing company and saying "OK, I want something kind of like this ... Off you go" is going to achieve anything except a situation where the outsourcing company is constantly extorting more money from you because they built what you specifically asked for and now you realise it doesn't do what you wanted it to and it will take another 6 months and massive piles of cash for the outsourcing company to come up with something else you will then realise isn't what you wanted either.
Anyway, it is very exciting and that's why I haven't posted much later. I think that lot will probably more than make up for it, in quantity anyway.
