Coder’s Eye

I was in an emergency meeting recently where the company had sold a big project, based in large part on a super-duper-solves-everything process tool. This tool, this magical tool, is to be the company’s leverage for bringing in all the facets of the project on time and under budget.

Problem is, there’s no such tool. They need to write it. Ouch. There’s a project plan and a timeline. The timeline says the project will be done in June. The work on the project that the tool is supposed to facilitate needs to start now.

What do you think the brilliant idea was to solve this problem? “Can you write us something to help us do this?” No! I can’t. I mean, I could, but what you need is the mystical-magical tool you’ve spec’d. In the meantime, what you are going to need to do is to work out a clear chain of responsibility, and actually talk to each other. You’ll need to manually do the things the tool is supposed to make simple.

The great thing was, I actually told them that. Maybe it is because I’ve been laid-off that I could actually point out the foolishness of what they were asking. You need to talk to each other. You need to have a defined flow for the various stages in releasing the client’s content. I can help you by setting up a document repository using our CMS. But that’s it.

It was such a liberating moment to tell them that they are going to have to live in the hole they just dug themselves. Me, I’ll be at my next employer. The tool will never happen, and that’s why the company just had to do a mass layoff. Plenty of vision, no execution.