Killing in the name of...
Killing meaningful work in the name of "guarding" developers from doing "too much" for a customer in a project where both sides of the stakeholders are sharing "free" research money and the project have not even started yet... does it sound any good?
Enter sadman
I am sad, yesterday I had to go out to the wine fields to make it go away using physical work. I can tell you in details why I felt so.
Tender grants are (in theory) given to make jumps that would not be possible otherwise, I do not care how many "they" steal and maybe some moralists would hate me for that but I take care for the jump to happen and the awsome results to get developed. The reason why I planned to lead the efforts is because in order to make this jump whilst knowing that people basically misuse a fair amount of shares in ways I better do not want to know about - so in this setup we would need a proactive leadership that creates environment for miracles. It does not cost as much as people believe, but it indeed involves a new kind of thinking.
If you know re/work, modular requirement gathering models, agile planning, results of psychological safety and even actually waterfall more than those who lead, you can surely feel like you are in trouble. These are empty ramblings you might say - but asking the so called project manager about how much effort the earlier project took with the same customer and he does not know is something to be aware of at least. The above project I am talking about will contain the redesigned whole earlier project as a module - while having 7 more possible modules with many times bigger scope. The plan is to create this system with 10-12 people in 8 months after 4 months of requirement planning - followed by 12 month of "refining" because the customer always tend to change their requirements. I do not know what you have to learn in order to feel this is a safe approach when the earlier mini-product took more than a year with 3 people. If they did not change the way of work, the first milestone of completing all the stuff after the first 12 months and only "refine" later is not far from a joke you would expect from Dilbert comics.
Just calculate 100% two years worth of time with 15 workers for the 7 new modules (meaning to use the entire old work as the first module) by comparing it to the earlier situation mathematically - and not counting teardown because of bigger project size etc.:
- Old: 3 man works 12 months 100% to produce 1/7th of the new system
- New: Will be built in 24 months by 5x as much people
"Wow! It is all good! We only have 7 times more work with 10 times more resources!!! Allocate it like this immediately!" :D
...or not: maybe it is not so awsome because no one calculates complexities, no one calculates in that the man one level above the pm said "no one will work 100% on this project" because we live in a matrix organizational structure and last but not least no one calculates in the endless pain of documenting everything for the tender.
The last will be a real pain, but I planned ahead and thank God the original project plan would let us document all real progress as part of the research documents. Quite unorthodox, but the only way to generate the amount of text we need in a reasonable time if we do not spend time working on bullshit, but instead we do the real progress in innovative and non-innovative parts of the development. I took a very hard time to write-in tricks for the tender that enables us to move fast such a way that indeed we can do real work in any time. I have planned to make a miracle by moving fast - not by planning out everything technically but the opposite: to have room for moving fast and agile in a way that attract people who are great enough to maybe work at google (or just not there by a small margin). The work environments where what you do really count is actually so rare that you can get awsome human resources for pennies (okay: compared to what you think). We have lost at least 3-4 developer like this because I could not say anything to them in that point when the project did not had a green light.
Now as the first such project have gotten a green light and I have found myself with a random guy - whom no one originally could use so I got - with no dedicated resources, nothing coming to life from the detailed HR strategy that contained a programming competition crafted for the projects algorithmic skill needs, a project tender that I intentionally wrote in such a way that "not only documentation" happens, but also "real work" and having expectations from the CEO that his company will change to the better. It has been changed already, but I have never actually thought that having as many resources as they have the process will be this slow and might even backfire.
It seems that middle level organizations stuck on that level for definite reasons. They tend to stuck in local maximums where they fear going both left and right. The bad thing is that for them I seem to be the "awsome programmer great in technology"®. No I am not. I have spent my time at the university to be around people who were and still are better than me technically and can learn any "technology" if they want. My growth strategy was about creating the most awsome environment for them by providing real meaning to their work. It counts a lot for me and I know it counts even more for them to know that they take part in what is awsome. Whenever I could shape the projects around me to have this feeling it did boost production - whilst now I keep bashing the keyboard to write this long blog-post in the time I have been supposedly working just to show the blind ignorance of anyone around me. Also without these I would never consider leaving and creating my own company neither. Also without them trying to guard their workers from the external business stakeholders would not make me feel that I cannot do my best in what I feel I could have been the best at.
I know it from long time ago that I cannot be the excellence purely technically. I can be above avarage, but if I would work myself up to work at places like google then I would burn out by always using up more than 100%. They did offer me possibilities, but I do not even dare to try - if for nothing else, for my love of my nation and desire to do awsome here and not abroad.
Anyways. Stealing money is a sin and I know one man who just said goodbye the first and ever time someone asked him to write bloated tenders. I was always more realist and dreamt of a win-win-win situation where actually moving faster than competition would pay off the dirty tricks I did not know of (just I am not naive). If something awsome would come out, that would be a win for the whole nation for the whole thing that comes out, a win for the company to have a team that applies real work ethics and methods usable to scale for other projects and even for those who only have the connections so that their money is not gone. I was "in" only because of this. But how can I quarantee success if there will be more obstactes than ever? :-(
EDIT - I have stumbled upon this
...end of bullshit...
I am happy that I have my awsome wife at least for whom I am considering to stay and for nothing else... I can strongly advice all intraprenours or people in stressful situations to have a wine garden to work at and an awsome wise life-long partner for whom you can take some pain...
Tags: management, dilbert, research, tender, high-hopes, sadness, bullshit, morale, work-ethics, de-moralized, apathy, work, intraprenour
