When projects go bad....
Category Work
As I alluded earlier, a year ago I was involved in a project that really didn’t work out very well for me. In fact it became the first time in my life that I have ever been “fired” from a project. We have all worked on a project or a job that just wasn’t suited for our skills or temperament, but this was something I really believed in and actually fought to make happen. I was already a proponent of the solution when I stumbled on to the project volunteered to provide insight and review expertise for the proposal. Ultimately I ended investing 2 months of full time effort writing the bulk of the management and delivery sections and desperately trying to instill some proposal management.
As I alluded earlier, a year ago I was involved in a project that really didn’t work out very well for me. In fact it became the first time in my life that I have ever been “fired” from a project. We have all worked on a project or a job that just wasn’t suited for our skills or temperament, but this was something I really believed in and actually fought to make happen. I was already a proponent of the solution when I stumbled on to the project volunteered to provide insight and review expertise for the proposal. Ultimately I ended investing 2 months of full time effort writing the bulk of the management and delivery sections and desperately trying to instill some proposal management.
I was not part of the company and was precluded from seeing the costing and staffing side of the solution. Once the project was won, I came on board to manage part of the project. When I started getting involved with the project, I discovered to my horror that no one had really taken the time to adequately develop an accurate cost model or put together a real delivery plan. A large part of the project involved the building of “widgets”. The organization had a basically good idea of how long and how much work was involved in building each widget, but no one had ever bothered to do the math to say if we need to build 200 widgets in 1 year and it takes x resources to build one, then it must take Z resources to build 200. I started producing documents showing these problems – but quickly discovered that bad news tended to reflect badly on the messenger.
Things started going downhill from there – amazingly, even though I was wrote large sections of the proposal as a company outsider with no knowledge of the internal workings of the customer, and raised a lot of red flags asking people to review my sections of the proposal, no one from the company bothered to read these sections before it was submitted. When the customer started to ask why the procedures in the management plan and customer service plan were not being followed or implemented, I started getting called on the carpet being asked why I had committed the company to these things. (The funny part was the company was told that one of the reasons they won the project was the strength of these sections in the plan).
The first thing I realized about the project was that for every widget that was built, the company received several hundred paying customers-that would write checks to the company each month for service. It was readily apparent to me (and others) that getting widgets built quickly was in everyone’s best interest. The company however didn’t want to spend money, so everything took twice as long to do because no one would commit to spending money. When an action needed to be taken that required spending money, management would step in and spend days trying to figure out a cheaper approach often resulting of a savings of just a few hundred dollars. I created a document that calculated out revenue and showed that every day that was wasted getting customers on-line resulted in the loss of $50,000 of potential revenue. Rather than get the message, management told me that I had stepped over the line by calculating the company income and that it was none of my business how much money was made.
The company had no technology in place to manage the project. Paperwork was nightmare – contracts that were less than a month old were lost, forms for government approval were hand typed and personally filed, which resulted in great confusion. I spent my evenings and wrote backend systems to track progress and started to get things organized and collaborative. As if often the case – upper management saw these systems as just another expense – even though I wasn’t charging them for my development time – it required hardware and more importantly, it required them to participate.
As it became clear that the project was floundering, management made another predictable, but unfortunate choice. Rather than listen to the criticism of the project approach that was coming from the entire “middle management” staff and making substantive changes, they hired an outside firm to come in and “validate” and rubberstamp their approach and then told everyone to buckle down and make it work. In most cases this would result in a lot of teeth gnashing and hard work to comply, but since all of the management staff was paid a very low daily rate (less than 3 hours at my usual billable rate) – the end result was we all faced with working even longer hours with no added incentive- and as a result a lot of bad feeling were generated.
I stuck things our for another 3 miserable months, but eventually as the project continued to spiral out of control, I was called in to the office, told I was disrespectful and ungrateful for criticizing the plan and summarily released.
This turned out to be a mixed blessing, I certainly was relieved from a lot of stress and the company actually found, much to their dismay, that my systems were not only being widely used they were now a critical component of the project and as a result after trying to demand that I support the system for free or give the code to another developer, they finally agreed to pay me to support the system – which generated almost as much revenue as I had been making working 80 hour weeks for them. However, a year and a half later the project is months behind schedule and reportedly 5 million over budget.
The point of this post, while cathartic in the writing, was to question how to approach these issues as a blogger. The project was exciting, the technology interesting, but how do you write about all of the great things you are doing without exposing all of the project faults? Ultimately, I decided to write nothing at all.
Things started going downhill from there – amazingly, even though I was wrote large sections of the proposal as a company outsider with no knowledge of the internal workings of the customer, and raised a lot of red flags asking people to review my sections of the proposal, no one from the company bothered to read these sections before it was submitted. When the customer started to ask why the procedures in the management plan and customer service plan were not being followed or implemented, I started getting called on the carpet being asked why I had committed the company to these things. (The funny part was the company was told that one of the reasons they won the project was the strength of these sections in the plan).
The first thing I realized about the project was that for every widget that was built, the company received several hundred paying customers-that would write checks to the company each month for service. It was readily apparent to me (and others) that getting widgets built quickly was in everyone’s best interest. The company however didn’t want to spend money, so everything took twice as long to do because no one would commit to spending money. When an action needed to be taken that required spending money, management would step in and spend days trying to figure out a cheaper approach often resulting of a savings of just a few hundred dollars. I created a document that calculated out revenue and showed that every day that was wasted getting customers on-line resulted in the loss of $50,000 of potential revenue. Rather than get the message, management told me that I had stepped over the line by calculating the company income and that it was none of my business how much money was made.
The company had no technology in place to manage the project. Paperwork was nightmare – contracts that were less than a month old were lost, forms for government approval were hand typed and personally filed, which resulted in great confusion. I spent my evenings and wrote backend systems to track progress and started to get things organized and collaborative. As if often the case – upper management saw these systems as just another expense – even though I wasn’t charging them for my development time – it required hardware and more importantly, it required them to participate.
As it became clear that the project was floundering, management made another predictable, but unfortunate choice. Rather than listen to the criticism of the project approach that was coming from the entire “middle management” staff and making substantive changes, they hired an outside firm to come in and “validate” and rubberstamp their approach and then told everyone to buckle down and make it work. In most cases this would result in a lot of teeth gnashing and hard work to comply, but since all of the management staff was paid a very low daily rate (less than 3 hours at my usual billable rate) – the end result was we all faced with working even longer hours with no added incentive- and as a result a lot of bad feeling were generated.
I stuck things our for another 3 miserable months, but eventually as the project continued to spiral out of control, I was called in to the office, told I was disrespectful and ungrateful for criticizing the plan and summarily released.
This turned out to be a mixed blessing, I certainly was relieved from a lot of stress and the company actually found, much to their dismay, that my systems were not only being widely used they were now a critical component of the project and as a result after trying to demand that I support the system for free or give the code to another developer, they finally agreed to pay me to support the system – which generated almost as much revenue as I had been making working 80 hour weeks for them. However, a year and a half later the project is months behind schedule and reportedly 5 million over budget.
The point of this post, while cathartic in the writing, was to question how to approach these issues as a blogger. The project was exciting, the technology interesting, but how do you write about all of the great things you are doing without exposing all of the project faults? Ultimately, I decided to write nothing at all.