Years ago during my career as a management consultant, I liked to think of myself in baseball terms, a relief pitch brought in to save the game in the late innings. At least that was the way it seemed ... until ....
My boss called me into his office. Wrap up your work in Pittsburgh. They need a little help on the big IT project here in Arizona. That sounded good to me. Very high profile work and I wouldn't have to travel. No more long plane rides and no more long hours spent in airports waiting for the long plane ride.
The first hint that the job was more than them needing a little help was when the overall project manager told me: "We need you here ASAP." Me: "You mean after Christmas." PM: "No, I mean before Christmas. You can take Christmas day and New Years day off." So I went back to Pittsburgh for the weekend, wrote to-do-notes on little yellow papers and pasted the to-do notes all over the remaining Pittsburgh project team's cubicles. Sayonara troopers!
As soon as I arrived at the project site in Arizona, the project manager handed me her work plan. She said: "You're in charge of the programmers and systems analysts ... and the work plan. Update the work plan before everyone gets back from Christmas vacation."
It wasn't my first rodeo, and it wasn't long before I realized there was a real probability I wasn't coming in as the closer. I was the guy they bring in to eat up innings to save the bullpen so it could save another game, another day. About the only kind thought I had for the boss who'd put me into the game was that he might not have known how bad things were ... but he must have had an inkling.
I reported back to the project manager.
"I have some good news and bad news. First the good news. It is possible to successfully finish the project. The bad news. You cannot finish it by the contractually promised due date. You will not be able to complete the project for the fixed amount our firm will be paid. It's just a matter of how much money the firm is gonna lose. Before you blow your stack. There's more bad news. You've already said in the work plan that it will take more than 100 programmers and system analysts to complete the project. You are far along in the project and are supposed to begin programming in a few weeks. You only have 50 people on the project now and only 5 of them are programmers. You need to hire at least 50 programmers who know the unique programming and database languages being used here (Datacom/Ideal). Worse still, you don't have any space or desks for the new programmers to work at. Start looking. The really bad news is that adding more programmers than you've already planned won't help you meet your promised delivery dates. You simply won't be able to break the work into enough smaller and manageable pieces for you to do that: you can't hire nine women to make a baby in one month.
They hired the programmers, literally bringing them in from all over the world. After much grumbling we got the customer to find more work space and desks for the additional programmers. The project didn't get completed on time, but it did get completed. The firm lost more money than even I imagined. The project manager who started the project was replaced not long after the bad news got out. Lots of promises were made to those of us who came in to save the day. None of them were kept.
