Buck has been informed by one of his faithful readers (hereafter known simply as "The Professor") that the last installment of his continuing adventures had a more bitter tone than usual. After further review of the blog entry in question, Buck is forced to agree with The Professor.
Additionally, Buck notices that the overall structure of the entry is completely inconsistent with the chronicles' hallmark narrative, third-person format. Therefore, in an effort to right this wrong, Buck submits the following entry intended to convey the same information as the previous one, except that the new entry will follow all the conventions of the idiom as established over the history of this blog:
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"Suddenly," wrote Buck from his desk, a desk which exposed both his back and his computer screen to the scrutiny of his client, "the client called Buck and a fellow consulting associate into a conference room. Pleasantries were exchanged: the client was about to take a three-day weekend vacation to a distant metropolis, and the consultants were politely questioned about their own weekend plans. In a bid to discourage any requests that might compromise his weekend freedoms, Buck made sure to mention that he did, in point of fact, have extensive plans. That his plans were frivolous and easily rescheduled he neglected to mention.
"The client shut the door, sat down and immediately underwent a complete personality change. He proceeded to launch into a sarcastic tirade, for lack of a better term."
Here Buck struggled for a moment, certain that the English language offered a noun more apropos than "tirade," especially since the client's voice remained calm throughout, despite the hostile undertones in plain evidence. Since no such perfect word was forthcoming he elected to give up and move on, after a furtive glance over his shoulder to ensure that he was not being observed. "The client spoke of the project (actually it's a program) in a curious way. 'Let's pretend for a moment,' he began, 'that there's a project, hypothetically speaking, and let's pretend this project's name is Smackdown.' "
"Buck bristled with anticipated rage, for 'Smackdown' was the actual name of the project*, not a hypothetical name at all, and the client was engaging in sarcasm, a tool he had historically proven to be clumsy with at best. It meant bad news for Buck and his friend, for the client had adopted the kind of tone one takes when chiding errant young children. He was treating the consultants like little kids, serving up a dis [sic] of cold scorn with a side of utter disregard for peoples' feelings. He proceeded to rant about the 'health' of the project and complained that he shouldn't be telling them about it, but they should be telling him. To professionals such as Buck and his colleague, this went without saying, it being part of the established principles and dogma of program and project management with which they had been programmed. And what the client was proclaiming hadn't happened, i.e., that the consultants hadn't been forthright in providing him important information about the health of the program, had actually happened on many occasions, but the client had a way of not hearing what he didn't want to hear. He was also deliberately withholding critical information so that he would have an opportunity to make the consultants appear ignorant and incompetent, and he unintentionally exposed this fact during his monologue.
"Buck was not the target of the lecture," he wrote of himself in the third person. "He was just a guy who would have to deliver one of the slides of the PowerPoint deck that this whole attack was intended to elicit. The major things the client was complaining about were squarely the responsibility of Buck's partner, the PMO Project Manager. Why the client had decided to slam the poor guy in Buck's presence was beyond comprehension, especially given the context that the client's own managers and peers were absent from the room. Why attack a guy who is supposed to be helping you? Why attack your consultant, who is your advocate, when there is no political ground to be gained, no one present who can witness you pinning the blame on the outsider?
"It's not like the client didn't want consultants around," Buck continued, almost but not quite certain that nobody was watching him. "By contrast, it was this very client who had wanted to bring in the team of consultants to begin with to help him manage a disparate group of people who didn't want project management practices employed at all. The PM consultant was on his side!
"Worse," raged Buck, "the client had put the consultants in an impossible position, requiring just two of them to institute the entire program and project management infrastructure (bearing in mind that the program includes well over 100 people), execute against it, perform in the roles of what would normally be eight people, all while trying to deliver against an inherently ridiculous time line in a culture where the performers resented the program leadership and, as fate would have it, didn't even report up to that leadership! It was an enterprise doomed to fail, and Dickless knew it."
"Is this true?" asked the seductive and always alert Mrs. 99.
"Yes it's true," replied Buck. "The client has no dick."
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Buck would like to extend special thanks to The Professor for calling Buck out on the quality of his earlier post, and also to the writers of the movie "Ghostbusters" featuring Bill Murray for inspiring the climactic punch-line.
* "Smackdown" isn't the real name of the project either, but Buck protects his anonymity from the client, just as Clark Kent doesn't go around telling Lex and his buddies that his real name is Kal-El and that he likes to dress up in bright, flashy tights.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Friday, April 20, 2007
Addendum to The Laws of Consultancy
The client will use you as a shield to hide his incompetence. Your job is to bend over and take it, bitch.
You are the client's advocate. His success is your number one priority. Your client can't succeed if you allow his weaknesses to be exposed. And if his weaknesses are so profound that you can't possibly avoid them being exposed, you must allow the burden of blame to fall upon you. It is your job.
God help you, though, if your client is so stupid as to actually believe the lies he spreads about your own incompetency, because then it will show up in the feedback he provides about you that ends up in your annual review.
So sayeth Buck.
You are the client's advocate. His success is your number one priority. Your client can't succeed if you allow his weaknesses to be exposed. And if his weaknesses are so profound that you can't possibly avoid them being exposed, you must allow the burden of blame to fall upon you. It is your job.
God help you, though, if your client is so stupid as to actually believe the lies he spreads about your own incompetency, because then it will show up in the feedback he provides about you that ends up in your annual review.
So sayeth Buck.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Patsy
Suddenly, Buck started typing again.
Over two months had elapsed since his last post, and it was almost two months between that posting and the previous one. Many things had happened in the intervening four months. Buck was no longer stationed in a printer closet five floors beneath an ultra-secure super fortress, frantically documenting an intranet portal’s content in a painstakingly manual page by page process to prepare for a migration that may or may not occur in late 2009, by which time all the content will have drastically changed anyway. No, those carefree days were gone now and seemed but a distant, blissful memory of a daydream.
Buck struggled to find the words to describe his new situation. Where to start? Perhaps by giving his new role a name, one that would summarize, in a word, the core truth, the absolute essence of his role. And that word he chose was this: Patsy.
“Let’s do a little role playing,” suggested Buck to his readers. “Pretend you’re a level 3 Business Systems Analyst with armor class 8 and 12 hit points. Here’s your character sheet [he hands you a piece of paper with complicated-looking facts and figures on it. You notice that your charisma attribute score is rather low]. “You receive a new assignment: define a requirements management plan for a program that will ultimately span over a score of projects tasked with integrating two financial institutions’ systems.
“There are actually three financial institutions involved: the parent company, who is your client, and who we shall hereinafter refer to as ‘The Client;’ there is Bank A who was acquired by The Client previously and who represents most of the business; and Bank B who has recently been acquired. Three institutions, three cultures, three totally different ways of doing things.
“Bank A has already been brought into the fold, but they’re a little like the French after the Nazis took over: there are snipers everywhere. The Bank B folks seem amiable enough, as far as Italian mafioso go. The program you are joining will be integrating Bank B systems with those of Bank A.
“The program has no governance model; therefore, there is no guiding vision for how to decide which systems should stay, which systems should be merged, and which systems should be retired. There is nobody at any level willing to step up to the plate and make the tough calls. The top dog says work it out amongst yourselves; the smaller dogs are fighting for turf.
“The program does not yet have a team structure or project teams defined. There are no project schedules. There is no risk and issue management plan. There is no scope document, Commissioner. The requirements are already late, and the top dog has crammed his hand way up his ass and pulled out a date for when the integration itself must be completed. Then he flung it on everyone and it stuck. Working back from that date, you see that it is impossible. You mention this, but The Client never changes dates, so you ask for more resources. 'Prove you need them,' is the response, which you know is patently impossible without the twenty or so tightly coupled project schedules that have yet to be completed. So everyone is tense. The situation stinks.
“Your job: create a requirements management plan. You have three days. On the fourth day you will shove it down people’s throats at a huge meeting in a far away city. You will be the first speaker, going ahead of the guys who will be talking to the same crowd about team structure, project management, and risk and issue management. There are snipers everywhere who will not hesitate to sabotage anything suspected of being a structured process designed to hold them accountable for actual work. You have two hours to speak.
“You are walking down the corridor to the conference room. You round a corner and [Buck rolls a twelve-sided die] a gelatinous cube blocks the way and closes in on you! You can see the rotten corpses of its previous victims suspended in its ooze! What do you do?”
Except for the gelatinous cube part, that all happened in January. Since then, Patsy--, er, Buck, has been set up to take the fall over and over and over again. He checked the mirror just this morning and still doesn’t see a target on his forehead, but he knows it must be there, because everyone else can see it but him.
Sucker.
Over two months had elapsed since his last post, and it was almost two months between that posting and the previous one. Many things had happened in the intervening four months. Buck was no longer stationed in a printer closet five floors beneath an ultra-secure super fortress, frantically documenting an intranet portal’s content in a painstakingly manual page by page process to prepare for a migration that may or may not occur in late 2009, by which time all the content will have drastically changed anyway. No, those carefree days were gone now and seemed but a distant, blissful memory of a daydream.
Buck struggled to find the words to describe his new situation. Where to start? Perhaps by giving his new role a name, one that would summarize, in a word, the core truth, the absolute essence of his role. And that word he chose was this: Patsy.
“Let’s do a little role playing,” suggested Buck to his readers. “Pretend you’re a level 3 Business Systems Analyst with armor class 8 and 12 hit points. Here’s your character sheet [he hands you a piece of paper with complicated-looking facts and figures on it. You notice that your charisma attribute score is rather low]. “You receive a new assignment: define a requirements management plan for a program that will ultimately span over a score of projects tasked with integrating two financial institutions’ systems.
“There are actually three financial institutions involved: the parent company, who is your client, and who we shall hereinafter refer to as ‘The Client;’ there is Bank A who was acquired by The Client previously and who represents most of the business; and Bank B who has recently been acquired. Three institutions, three cultures, three totally different ways of doing things.
“Bank A has already been brought into the fold, but they’re a little like the French after the Nazis took over: there are snipers everywhere. The Bank B folks seem amiable enough, as far as Italian mafioso go. The program you are joining will be integrating Bank B systems with those of Bank A.
“The program has no governance model; therefore, there is no guiding vision for how to decide which systems should stay, which systems should be merged, and which systems should be retired. There is nobody at any level willing to step up to the plate and make the tough calls. The top dog says work it out amongst yourselves; the smaller dogs are fighting for turf.
“The program does not yet have a team structure or project teams defined. There are no project schedules. There is no risk and issue management plan. There is no scope document, Commissioner. The requirements are already late, and the top dog has crammed his hand way up his ass and pulled out a date for when the integration itself must be completed. Then he flung it on everyone and it stuck. Working back from that date, you see that it is impossible. You mention this, but The Client never changes dates, so you ask for more resources. 'Prove you need them,' is the response, which you know is patently impossible without the twenty or so tightly coupled project schedules that have yet to be completed. So everyone is tense. The situation stinks.
“Your job: create a requirements management plan. You have three days. On the fourth day you will shove it down people’s throats at a huge meeting in a far away city. You will be the first speaker, going ahead of the guys who will be talking to the same crowd about team structure, project management, and risk and issue management. There are snipers everywhere who will not hesitate to sabotage anything suspected of being a structured process designed to hold them accountable for actual work. You have two hours to speak.
“You are walking down the corridor to the conference room. You round a corner and [Buck rolls a twelve-sided die] a gelatinous cube blocks the way and closes in on you! You can see the rotten corpses of its previous victims suspended in its ooze! What do you do?”
Except for the gelatinous cube part, that all happened in January. Since then, Patsy--, er, Buck, has been set up to take the fall over and over and over again. He checked the mirror just this morning and still doesn’t see a target on his forehead, but he knows it must be there, because everyone else can see it but him.
Sucker.
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