Just a quickie

I was up extra early today due to problems with staying asleep, partly caused by something going by the name of Maggot 2 doing his best impersonation of "many crumbs in bed", and thus driving me from my crib to a place where tea could be made, and a couple of episodes of Frasier could be watched.

It is now 7am and both Maggots are down, which means I lose control of the controller, and am banished to the kitchen for apple juice and toastandmarmite.  Unusually for a Monday, I am in the office today.  Late Friday there was a three line whip for a bunch of interested and not so interested parties to go in to the office to review a large project that those at the top believe is going off course.  In fairness, it is going off course, but the main reason is that the course set prior to customer signature was set by the commercial folks, let's call them the vampires, whose goals are about getting it signed up, not making it deliverable.  The usual adage in Starfleet is sign it up first, work out how we are going to deliver it second, the imperative being that only by having a severe problem with resourcing can we solve it, and thus it was so on this deal.  That is all well and good; we are a commercial organisation etc. etc., however the power is with the vampires and not with the technical folks, let's call them the lambs* so, by way of an example, when the customer is pushing to crunch the timeline on the project, the vampires have to control themselves to avoid dribbling on the contract, whereas the lambs are silently looking skywards for the missing month in the plan.

All that abstract rambling is to say that we have a project where the vampires promised a certain timeline, against the advice of the lambs, which is like the pebble advising against the tide coming in.  Now that the vampires are looking at ways to spend their bonus, the lambs are sitting in a room saying "what the . . . . ".  Once the customer gets wind of such things, they escalate to our senior management team, and our senior management team call a meeting to "get the project back on track".

This meeting will be attended by both lambs and vampires.  My attendance is almost incidental, but as the lead for the lambs who put the proposal together, it is probably right I be there for image, something I care not much about really, and also to support my team, something I care about a lot.  Quite how the "... the vampires made up the timeline to satisfy the customer ..." discussion will go, only time will tell.

Have a good day, speak again soon.

---------------------------------------------

* As in the World War 1 "lambs to the slaughter"