So, for the third time in my entire 25+ year career as a project/program manager (a career that has spanned easily over a hundred individual projects and over a dozen major programs) I have had a project/program “mothballed” instead of deploying.
This is only the second time it has been a project I expected to actually deploy. The first time I had a project that “failed” it was due to a corporate buyout and the new ownership forced every organizational division to scale all development back except their “top five”. Because one of my projects at that time was a pilot project not only for new technology but also for a new process (The Rational Unified Process, which by then I had grown to hate) it was summarily axed without so much as an “archive it all off in case we revive it later”. I had another project at that time that did survive, so I at least kept my job.
The second time it was a project that everyone knew was doomed to be canceled because it was clearly politically unacceptable to one of the major parts of the overall organization, plus it very probably ran afoul of some very important corporate policies, including some mandated by the government. The CTO still wanted it to be pushed forward and he and I acknowledged that it was highly unlikely to succeed but he had to demonstrate that he had explored every avenue. So for five months I fought every internal bureaucracy in the company and was eventually stymied by the Legal Department over the enormous complexity of literally thousands of client contracts, some 30% of which would have to be renegotiated for the project to succeed. So I don’t feel bad about that one at all.
But this time it’s more like a typical corporate failure, which really bugs me because I had so far throughout my career managed to avoid projects/programs like that, mostly deliberately. And I had thought this one would not fall prey to corporate politics, but bet on the wrong horse for the first time in my career.
See, the program was the pet program of the CEO of the company. It was a process intensive program with very little technical risk. The principals in the program were all people I had worked with before and whom I knew were competent. The CTO and the Global Product Development EVP were also fully on board, so three of the top five people in the company were pushing it.
Seemed pretty solid footing to me.
And we got it to the very edge of deployment. Last week we were literally on our final round of System Testing and had already completed a chunk of User Acceptance Testing. All signs were go.
Then the CEO retired for “health reasons”.
Ouch. We all sort of took a deep breath then, but the CTO and GPD guys were still there, so we continued on.
A few days later both of them “quit” to “pursue other career options.”
And last Tuesday our program was put on “indefinite hold”.
So close. Sooooo close.
Oh well, onward we go.
(Minor editorial note. The project schedule/plan image is a generic one I pulled off of google. I could not post an actual plan from our actual project without violating corporate policies.)
10 users commented in " Corporate life… "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackOne other comment. This is one of the main reasons I hadn’t posted anything in over a week. That plus the “getting the house ready for sale”. So I’ve been pretty busy lately.
I hope it will all work at ok for you…
Well, the “official” reason for this turn of events matches what I know of the reality. The loss of the CEO and the apparent firing of the CTO and GPD executives was due to a general sense that we need to change direction, and since this program was their specific pet program, as soon as they left I expected this result.
I suspect that two months from now we’ll be back in the trenches with a slightly different approach to solving the same problem. It needs to be solved.
In the meantime I’ve got several smaller projects that had been put on hold to complete the program that will ramp back up, so I hope I will continue to be employed. Crossing my fingers.
So the perception of this particular project amongst my peers in the development org was pretty much ‘Take a horribly inefficient process. Make it more complex. Declare success!’
Maybe that’s a completely unfair characterization and there was just a lack of effective marketing, but I suspect there are many people outside of your org who aren’t shedding many tears.
But, I empathize with you. Having the rug pulled at the 11th hour is never a motivating experience. And I may soon be looking for a job also.
So, when do you expect to be done with the corporate life, Cosmic? I can tell you 20 years at Intel has been extremely rewardiing, but the fast pace and sky high expectations have also taken a toll. Sometimes I think corporate life, particularly at a cutting edge, high-tech company like Intel, is a younger man’s game…and I’m not getting any younger.
Just thinking out loud here. I find myself becoming increasingly more sanguine about the prospect of leaving the corporate life behind with it’s long hours and capricious politics. Don’t know when that might happen or what would follow, but I think about it all the time these days…
pace, I don’t completely disagree with you actually. However, I do think there was some value to the cross-functional prioritization, which is where I think a whole bunch of pain and problems in the Development and Data Center organizations comes from. I would have liked to have seen some progress in being able to tell resources in IT which of three projects was truly the higher priority.
Dadman, as long as I have to I suppose.
I would argue it’s very hard to determine how long you ‘have’ to do something. If you’re like me (and I think you are) pure financial pragmatism is the key criterion you use when determining what has to be done. It’s both a virtue and a fault. Somewhere in the mix of deciding what we have to do, particularly at our age, there should be a dose of passion and heart. Some of the most contented people I know are financially poor, but fill their days with activities that richly reward them in other important ways.
Anyway, I’m just thinking out loud again. My present Intel project is such a cluster it may force me to make some very tough decisions. As usual, I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing. It might even be a fantastic thing…
Frankly, this sort of thing is why I stick with startups. If the CEO doesn’t know my first name, the company’s too big.
I can deal with any amount of actual work, but office politics is pure nonsense, and while there’s always politics in any group of humans greater than one, startups are small enough and focused enough that stuff like this rarely happens.
I’ve done the startup thing too. It has its own positives and negatives. Moving from a startup to a corporate position was a more than twice increase in my salary. Not to mention benefits and what has been pretty reasonable job security, which has been important for my wife and me in raising a special needs child.
Dadman, yeah, I’ve been giving a lot more thought to passion lately too. A lot more. I need to get some passion back. I used to have a lot at work, but not for the past few years. It’s not the corporate politics that is running me down, it’s the grind of doing a job that I no longer get excited about.
I think lack of passion for my current work is likely what is running me down too…and not so much the long hours and/or corporate politics.
Leave A Reply