TTotM

If the first Monday of the month, it must be the Monthly Project Review. Sometimes it’s the second Tuesday. Sometimes the first Thursday. To avoid confusion, let’s refer to it as That Time of the Month. It’s just as painful.

There are three types of projects: engineering, operations, and professional services gigs. Engineering projects are the easiest to understand: they build widgets that are sold externally. Operations projects include internal projects like deploying an ERP system or replicating engineering’s widgets for customers. The professional services gigs are opportunistic whoring for money.

The premise is noble: all managers will meet on a regular basis to go through schedules, resolve contention among shared resources, and solve problems. All of these projects run over in some way or another. For example, the ERP project came to 120% of what was budgeted. The most out of control are the professional services gigs, as they’re rarely aligned with our road map, nor are they well-tracked.  (In particular, we do not cost-account for QA, documentation and the long-term costs.)  We undertake them thinking they’ll be the most profitable. If the cost of adding insane product requirements to other projects and burdening shared resources were honestly calculated and attributed, we’d never do them.

For example, a customer wanted our product available in Sumerian. (Money money money, let’s do it!) An engineer came up with a way we could support cuneiform, though it would need to be totally redone in a few years when we go to a new development environment. One translation service was employed to come up with the graphemes, while another verified their work. El Jefe took it over, thinking it would be a quick victory dance for himself, but as he is neither technical, nor a “detail person” to bother with such pedestrian endeavors such reading the contract, he flailed around for five months getting the customer’s acceptance.

Then a funny thing happened: the customer decided not to use any of it. Were this merely a prix fixe dinner, there wouldn’t be a story. But alas, the contract was done on a cost-sharing basis. Its primary justification assumed a steady, long-term royalty stream with future, incremental work to translate into Akkadian, Hittite, Hattic and Urartian.

I wouldn’t be as concerned if there wasn’t a contractual note obligating us to extend any future product changes into Sumerian within ninety days. I’ve raised this issue at every MPR meeting since January, but it remains unresolved.