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.