Quality Assurance
The Unit Manager
The executive dining room was, of course, on the top floor of the building. In many respects it resembled a fine commercial restaurant. The waiters and waitresses were impeccably groomed. The napery was blindingly white, and each table boasted a crystal vase with a single sprig of small orchids. Although the food did not resemble little volcanic islands of deliciousness rising out of bright colored oceans of sauce as it did in some French restaurants, it was very high quality real down home American cookin'.
Agnes, the maitre-d, a powerful figure with an iron will, was disguised as a short, dumpy woman with greying hair and a friendly smile. At her whim, lunch at the corner table with the panoramic view of the city could turn into an ordeal at the back table where the kitchen door bumped into the back of your chair every time a wait-person emerged. Agnes remembered the names of every executive in the company, knew their exact position in the hierarchy, and whether their particular star was ascendent or declining at any point in time. Executives who couldn't tell whether they were in with the in crowd or out with the garbage could get a good reading on the situation by having lunch in the executive dining room and noting the desirability of the table Agnes gave them.
"Hello, Agnes," said Bill. "I've got a project status meeting up here today."
"Hi, Bill. Haven't seen you for a while." said Agnes with a motherly smile. "You're going to be in one of the small dining rooms today. And Mr Bartland's secretary called and said he would be a little late."
The small dining rooms were one of the differences between the executive dining room and an ordinary restaurant. They were rooms designed specifically for business lunch meetings. Each contained a single table, six was the smallest and the largest sat about twenty. As well as plates and silverware and the ordinary luncheon amenities, the small dining rooms had computer-based slide projectors, telephone conference call facilities, and a whiteboard on one wall. One seat at the head of the table boasted a control panel that could be used to dim the lights, call the waiter, or start a slide show.
Unfortunately, the one Agnes steered him to was unoccupied. Was he early? A peek at his bottom-of-the-line Rolex informed him that he was actually a fashionable couple of minutes late. This could only mean that the three other diners all knew that the CEO was going to be late and were correspondingly late themselves. The fact that he hadn't been informed meant that things were worse than he thought. Bill had come to report that the project was going to go over budget and beyond the target date he had promised earlier. Of course, everyone that would be present already knew what he was going to say and the decision as to whether to cancel the project or add funds to it had already been made, so the meeting had more of a feeling of going to confession rather than providing information. Bill picked out one of the six empty chairs and sat down to wait. Forgive me father, for I have sinned.
Bill was surprised, even shocked, that his careful estimates had gone so far wrong. Everything took longer than he had estimated and half the tasks the project team had been working on weren't even on his original list. Data conversion? Who'd have thought that they needed data conversion? Why couldn't they just use the old data? And who'd have thought testing would be such a big deal? If they had done it right in the first place they wouldn't need all that testing. But when he had suggested something along that line to Susan, she looked at him like he was a dog turd on the carpet in front of her and he had to beat a hasty retreat.
The CEO and his three hatchet men arrived about twenty minutes late. By that time Bill felt like a quiz show contestant that had been sent to the isolation booth while every one else was being informed of the right answers to the questions. And yet...he felt a grudging admiration for the CEO because he knew he'd never find out whether he had been kept waiting accidentally or on purpose. "What a guy," thought Bill.
"Sorry to keep you waiting, Bill," said the CEO as he entered the room and moved immediately to the seat with the control panel. "The budget meeting droned on longer than usual today."
Budget meeting! Bill felt a hot flush creep up out of the collar of his incredibly white shirt. They've just been to a budget meeting? Then his fate was already sealed. He just didn't know what it was. "Those budget meetings can be a bit of a snore sometimes. Anything interesting happen?"
"Nothing much," said the CEO, "A few interesting initiatives we have to find funding for. Everyone ready for lunch?"
The CEO pressed the Waiter button on his control panel and a young man with a short, white coat and black pants appeared almost immediately. "Do you have any of that '89 Chateau Palmer left? I need something to wash down those dry numbers." Drinking at lunch in the executive dining room was frowned on but not completely illegal. Most people stuck with coffee or tea out of fear of their dining companions inserting a comment about lunchtime drunkenness into the thriving corporate rumour mill, but rules were made to be broken -- particularly if you're the CEO.
* * * *
Projects with budgets and target dates that are completely inadequate (Why Projects are Always Late and Over Budget) still slog along through the muck for a while before admitting that they aren't going to come anywhere near their budgets and target dates. Still, they're hard to kill. The money issue has a poker game feel to it. Whatever you've thrown in the pot already is gone. The issue is how much additional you have to throw in to see the hand through to the end, and that's usually substantially less than the initial cost. So from a money standpoint, many projects approach their ends asymtotically, the project begins by asking for a dollar, comes back a few months later and asks for an additional 50 cents, a month later it's asking for a quarter, then for a dime, a nickel, and finally a penny. Each time, although the aggravation level of management goes up, the project is harder and harder to kill.
A second reason that it's hard to kill a running project is the disruption it causes with the project personnel. What can you do with the people who were working on the now defunct project? Scattering them around to other running projects doesn't always work very well; sometimes the skill sets of the killed project personnel don't match the running projects and they end up being a fifth wheel on the new project. Solving the problem by telling them to take a month or so off with pay is, of course, unthinkable.
Another personnel aspect of killing projects that management doesn't know about or completely ignores is the unhappy and disgruntled people that result from it. After all, it's rarely the fault of a programmer or QA person that the project is late, and they are put in the position of watching a lot of work and effort, in which they may have taken some personal pride, go spinning down the drain. I think the real genesis of my consulting company was a long project that was cancelled about three-quarters of the way through because the company decided to make a drastic hardware change. Two of the employees that quit as a result of that eventually became my business partners.
So Bill really didn't have a lot to worry about -- at least about the project being cancelled. His career may suffer a bit of a setback, but probably nothing too serious since project overruns are so common. The CEO did about the right thing, he put Bill on the grill for a while and let him sizzle before giving him the extensions. If Bill continues to come back to the well time after time, he'll still get the money he needs and the project extensions, but the next time he tries to start a new project he'll find that George, the budget committee geek, is given full rein to examine the new project in detail.