So What’s a Half a Million Dollars Among Friends?

If you’ve ever stepped into the middle of a project (see Stepping into the Middle of a Configuration Management Project: Watch Where You Put Your Feet) you’ll appreciate this post. You know you need to avoid stepping in poo with one or both feet. Unfortunately, often you can’t see the poo regardless of how experienced you may be. Somehow, you need to find out if there are any legacy issues that are hidden from view. Such intelligence could make or break your professional survival.

Years ago I was brought in on a project that, unknown to me, had the distinction of wasting nearly half a million dollars in the previous year. It didn’t matter how many questions I might have asked at the outset, how many people I had talked to or how thoroughly I researched the proposed approach, the only one who was really understood the details, an obscure financial analyst, was not talking. It was only by accident that I stumbled across this guy. No one else that had been associated with the project had insight to the finances - or, perhaps more accurately, no one was willing to talk about it as they, amazingly, didn’t consider it relevant. When I confronted my sponsor with this information, I was told that the project team had simply done a poor job of project management. The sponsor was not the least bit surprised at the magnitude of the dollar figure. Even more amazing, this person didn’t consider the information to have any material significance for our task at hand and seemed a bit perturbed that I had taken the time to dig deep enough to uncover what could be described as nothing less than a colossal failure.

Management excused this as poor project management and a lack of control over the contractors. Well, NO KIDDING! But this very issue was one of the reasons, if not THE reason, the program was meeting resistance. Funding for our program was originally intended to tap available business unit budgets to augment a portion of the annual IT budge. Had I known about this red herring earlier I would have taken a completely different approach. As it was, the project was already underway and, because of the lack of funding alternatives caused by this legacy of waste, had languished for nearly a month while we worked to gain business unit support. IT had already lost credibility and resurrecting a failure under “new management” wasn’t going to restore the faith of the company in IT.

What bothers me about this is not so much the waste or even the failure of the original project (which failed to show ANY deliverables at all) but the seemingly ambivalence of those who DID know toward the half a million dollars! Why is it OK to dump this kind of money on a project and have nothing to show for it? Why wasn’t this information discussed with the new project team right at the outset? Why didn’t the project sponsor understand that this piece of information was critical to success of the new project? Where was corporate governance in setting guidelines, review boards, steering committees and project performance standards? Considering the magnitude of this failure, why was current IT management still employed? Shhh…we’ll just keep this information amongst us friends. OK?