These uneasy thoughts vanish away as the unit's business manager strides up to her. "You must be Mary," he says, extending a hand, "I'm Bill, the department manager. I've been looking forward to doing this project for quite some time."

The business manager is wearing a perfect suit. Every pinstripe is in place, not too wide, not too narrow. His wingtip shoes seem to have been polished within the last fifteen minutes. He wears a white shirt and a blue tie dotted with tiny company logos. He is very enthusiastic about the project. He invites Mary into his office, "Costs a quarter to get in, fifty cents to get out," he quips.

Over the next hour, Bill talks about how this project will make great strides in achieving upper managements objectives. He talks about how improved efficiency and timely reporting will attract new customers to the business and how he expects it to reduce his head count by 40 percent. Noticing a worried look in Mary's eye he quickly follows that statement with, "Of course we're not going to fire anyone. We'll transfer some people to other departments and offer a few an early retirement."

Mary finds herself puzzled by some of this talk. Everything he mentions seems like obvious objectives of the system. Of course you want to improve efficiency. That's what computers are all about! Naturally reporting should be done on a timely basis. Mary feels like she's in church and the priest is telling her to, "Do good and avoid evil." But in spite of these occasional forays into the obvious, she's very impressed with Bill. He's a forward thinker and is likely on the fast track to promotion within the company.

About then, Judy, Bill's second in command, appears. She's wearing a conservative, tailored suit and a scarf with little company logos on it. Her hair is done in a tousled style, but Mary notices that not a strand is out of place. They adjourn to a nearby conference room to give Mary an extended chalk talk on the project.

Mary leaves three hours later with a notebook full of boxes, arrows, clouds, databases, Internet connections, and a notation about a LAN product called LightningLan that operates through the electrical power lines. Bill gives her an advertisement for it on a page ripped out of a data processing magazine. She had never heard of a LAN that runs through the electrical power lines before, but she sort of gave Bill and Judy the idea that she knew about it without actually saying so.

"Oops, pardon."

"Anxious to get away from the bosses office, eh?"

"Not at all." Mary is a bit offended by this lack of respect. The woman apparently didn't realize what a fine manager she had in Bill.

Back at her desk, Mary took a last look around before starting her Analysis document. On one of her cubicle walls were the certificates she had earned for completing a class in Visual Basic and another in Web design. On the other were pictures of her three cats: Tegan, Adrick, and Ace, (named after Dr Who companions) that shared her one-bedroom apartment. Her desk was clean as always. She recaptured a memo that had escaped from its file folder and returned it to captivity. She was ready to start!

Mary marshaled her document tools: a word processor, a flow-charter, a spreadsheet for computing costs and times, and a presentation manager loaded with cute little clip-art. She starts by turning her meeting notes on the new system into a flowchart. It's so simple, yet so elegant! How could they have waited until now to put in a system like this? A tiny cloud drifts in front of this new sun as she wonders for a moment why that guy back in the operating unit was stapling the blue card to the pink sheet of paper, but she dismisses it as probably being not too important. The flowchart turns out to be a little sparse, but she adds quite a bit of verbiage to it and lengthens the arrows between the boxes a bit and she thinks it ends up looking quite nice.

Over the next week Mary completed her first draft of the Business Systems Design. She reviewed it extensively with the Bill and Judy. They loved it. It's diagramed, it's documented, it's top-down, it uses LigntningLAN, it's beautiful!

Mary's last job is to estimate the time required for the project. There's something odd about this task since the project already has a target date and a budget that were established before she ever started work, but she perseveres anyway. Invoking her spreadsheet product with a single wave of the wand, er . . . click of the mouse, she makes rows of all the programming tasks she has identified and columns of the necessary activities for each one. It looked like this:

Finally, the Business Systems Design is finished. Mary turns it over to Susan, the project leader.

Listening to the business manager, by the way, presents its own difficulties. Non data Processing people justifiably complain about "geek-speak," but there's also a "manager-speak" shared by business managers, politicians, TV Evangelists and used car salesmen. Although no Rosetta Stone has been uncovered for this language yet, one of its key tenets is expressing negative information in positive terms. Your teenage son wrecked the family car? It's an opportunity to improve the quality of family transportation. You didn't get the promotion? It's a chance to complete the work you started in your current position. Once you get the general idea, you can do some useful translations. When Bill talked to Mary about "improving customer reporting," she thought he was making a silly, obvious statement, "Of course we want to improve customer reporting," she thought with some disdain, "What a silly thing to say." But if she'd had a good grasp on manager-speak, she might, instead, have thought, "Oops, there must be something wrong with customer reporting." A few questions would have brought it out of hiding.

"Bill, I was just wondering, are our customers happy with the quality and timeliness of the information they get from us?"

"Er, well, as a matter of fact we did have some problems with that last year. One of our biggest customers went to another company when we couldn't return data on their purchase orders fast enough."

Mary may have just discovered the reason that the project is being done. She probably assumed, as many data processors would, that it was being done because automated systems are just inherently better than manual ones and, "obviously," you want to eventually automate everything. The managers that fund these projects don't think that way. Their motto is more like, "if it ain't broke don't fix it" rather than, "we climbed that mountain because it was there." There are really only two reasons that projects are done, saving money and saving face. In this case, it might be both. Losing a major customer is a financial setback, an embarrassment to the company, and possibly a personal embarrassment to the CEO. Whatever the basic reason for the project's existence might be, other reasons -- probably all valid considerations -- will be added to it until a little "project justification confection" is produced. Nothing wrong with that, but it does make it difficult to tell what's really important, i.e., what's the cherry and what's just the chocolate covering.

It would behoove Mary to figure out the real reasons that the project is being done. No one will do anything so overt and gauche as to come right out and tell her; she'll have to figure that out for herself. Listening to the oak leaves rustle at Delphi, or gutting a junior manager and examining the steaming entrails are sometimes useful techniques, but she needs to do it somehow, because whether she solves the problem that was at the root of the project will determine whether it is viewed as a success or a failure.