When you sign on for a project, here are 10 forces that are beyond your control and may hobble your best efforts
By
John Tibbetts and Barbara Bernstein
ou know those movies where a freelance gunfighter, hired to clean up town, discovers that the cattle baron, the trigger-happy young psycho, and several of the Sheriff's deputies all have the same last name? He usually says something laconic like, "Gonna be tougher than I thought."
It's not just in the old West that hired guns find themselves facing stiff odds. Computer consultants, too, occasionally walk into situations that we wish we could walk right back out of-were it not for our code of honor, of course, and our mad, persistent conviction that a fresh look at the problem, a clear explanation of the alternatives, and a solution that takes everybody's interests into account will eventually win the day.
For the benefit of those Jimmy Stewart types who see only opportunities to do good-and for IS departments who may wonder why their outside consultants have so little impact-we offer 10 warning signs
of "tougher-than-I-thought" consulting gigs.
A company's CEO come
s up after you've spoken at a trade show and says she wants her IS executives to hear what you have to say. But the CIO takes two weeks to return your call, then has a hard time finding a date for your first meeting.
The project manager clips stories from the weeklies, eternally excited about the latest fad. Some checking around reveals that the project has been delayed repeatedly as the company switched from Sybase to Oracle to Forté, and now to NetDynamics.
The mainframe people, the PC people, and the Unix people eat lunch at different restaurants. You've been asked for a front-to-back distributed solution that integrates these technologies, and you face a developer organization primed to fight the Battle of Gettysburg.
The CIO is a celebrity. You recognize him from the covers of magazines like this one, but he doesn't recognize you from one meeting to the next. He knows the names of everybody in the industry-except the people who work for him.
Or the converse: There's
not a single copy of this or any other industry publication in the whole place. Walk through the door, and you're in a technological Brigadoon. No one subscribes to any magazines. No one goes to trade shows. When you propose a lunchtime excursion to a technical bookstore, you get blank looks.
Senior management has just returned, starry-eyed, from a Microsoft rally. They've been sold on Bill's comprehensive plan for the future (which at various times in our experience has been WOSA, OLE, ActiveX) and don't want to hear from any naysayers.
The project manager has recently been hired away from a system vendor. She assures you she won't be biased-after all, she changed jobs to get an industry-wide perspective-then defines requirements that could have come straight from her former employer's product literature.
Everybody on your team is younger than 26. They believe everything worthwhile was invented within the last five years, that if it's not Web-enabled it doesn't merit a user interfac
e, and that "disaster recovery" was taken care of in Independence Day.
The development environment is so authoritarian that programmers have to go through three layers of management just to get an OK on a cosmetic change to a display. Or, just as bad, there is so much "user empowerment" that nobody is sure which of the 20 versions of the customer database stores the data of record.
There are vending machines everywhere, you have to pay for coffee, and candy bars cost 85 cents. A company that tries to make money off its developers' nutritional lapses is in trouble.
John Tibbetts and Barbara Bernstein are partners in Kinexis,
a San Francisco consulting firm. You can visit them at their Web site at
www.kinexis.com
.
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