Making It Happen. Kyle Mackenzie

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      “Anyway,” Stu continued, “you know Ralph. If it looks good, he’s 100 percent behind you until it looks bad, at which point it was your idea. If this does go, he’ll be promoted and I’ll have a shot at his job. If it’s a flop, well, I need a change anyway.”

      My predecessor was one of those people whom Ralph supported 100 percent until things started looking bad. She had developed a great idea about using the IS department as a clearing house for employee feedback. Of course not all of it was positive, and Ralph had started getting nervous about someone other than him knowing the dirty secrets about employee attitudes. She was fired for “poor performance”, but everyone knew the real reason.

      Stu sighed. “Besides, regardless of promotions or office politics, I happen to think this is what the company should be doing.” He stuck his chin out heroically.

      Whenever people start to get noble, I get nervous. Doing the “right” thing is nice up until you haven’t got a job anymore.

      “Well, you know me, Stu,” I told him. “I’ll support you however I can. I’d love to see you get Ralph’s job. What can I do?”

      Stu looked at me, and suddenly I felt like a lamb being mentally barbecued by a wolf. He smiled. “I want you to be the Project Manager.”

      I stared back at him. Project Manager? A hundred objections formed themselves in my mind – I don’t know anything about boat design! I know nothing about factory set-up! I’m not an engineer!

      The Project Manager

      Instead of voicing these thoughts I said, “Okay.”

      “Good!” he said, clapping his hands together. My feeling of doom deepened.

      “Now Ralph did, of course, impose a few conditions. Nothing too serious, nothing we can’t work around.”

      Just what I like. Conditions set by the boss that you have to work around.

      “For starters, I’ll be the project sponsor, but you’ll ultimately have to go to Ralph for spending approval.”

      “Right,” I said. Oh good, I thought, up the bureaucratic ladder to the ultimate control freak before I can spend a dime. That will be fun.

      “Ralph wants Al Burton on the project team.” Stu looked at me, anticipating some kind of response.

      “What!!” I screamed, “That asshole? The last project he was on was a total screw up. What the hell do we need – ”

      “As you know,” Stu interrupted, “TQM was a complete success.”

      “That project was a disaster!” I retorted.

      A year ago, when Total Quality Management was trendy, Ralph had assigned Al Burton to implement it at our plant. Al seemed the logical choice because he was an engineer, was head of Industrial and Production Engineering, and was the only Certified Project Manager at Hyler. Although it was supposed to have taken three months, according to Al, and cost $150,000, it was still going on, in a haphazard way. The bill was now almost $800,000. Since no objective had yet been established, other than to “do things in a quality way”, no results had been achieved. Morale in the plant had never been worse.

      Stu said, “You and I both know it was and is a dismal failure. But Ralph needed it to be successful, and so it was successful. Putting Al on this team is Ralph’s way of having an insider, a spy. Ralph can depend on Al, because Ralph had to make sure TQM and Al’s project didn’t fail.” He sighed. “In this organization, politics are part of everything we do. You’d be stupid to ignore it. Just don’t let it affect the success you want to achieve.”

      I knew that was good advice, but it got so frustrating having to work within those ground rules. I began to pray Al would get hit by a bus.

      “You know how Ralph likes jargon,” Stu continued, “Well, he picked up a bunch of things from Al’s last project that he wants to see on this one.”

      I readied my pencil and paper.

      “Ralph wants you using some project management software to make reporting easier.” Wonderful, I thought. More software to learn. “He wants a schedule of milestones by the end of this week. He wants to see it in a Gantt chart format, but he’s leaving the choice of the software up to you.” Stu added that I had to provide work breakdown structures, earned value costing, TQM integration, and this is where you came into the conversation.

      I had survived many projects in the past, but the size of this one made me nervous, not to mention the employment implications. I had a sign in my office that looked like this:

Steps in a Project

      1. Enthusiasm

      2. Action

      3. Consternation

      4. Panic

      5. Obfuscation

      6. Punishment of the innocent

      7. Praise and rewards to the non-participants

      It was supposed to be humorous, but it rang just a little too true.

      I had a vague idea about work breakdown structures, earned value costing, and I had actually tried using Gantt charts for doing scheduling. I had used those tools in one of my university courses, but none of them had helped me much on real projects. And now I felt like I would be needing all the help I could get.

      “Why me?” I asked Stu, “Why not Al? He’s the certified project manager.”

      Stu sighed again and stared off into the middle distance. “I want this thing to have a chance of succeeding,” The compliment must have shown on my face because he immediately said, “Now don’t get a swelled head. You could just as easily screw it up. But I know Al has the wrong approach. He’s proved it on every project he’s managed here at Hyler. You, on the other hand, have a fighting chance of trying something different, even if out of desperation, and we just might succeed.”

      As I sat there feeling somewhat deflated, he continued. “I know you, Will, and you don’t put a lot of stock in textbooks if you see that it doesn’t work in reality. Al believes that if the textbooks say it, it must be right, regardless of whether it actually works.”

      “So I’ve got a free rein to do whatever makes it work?”

      Stu hedged. “Within reason. You’ve still got to keep Ralph happy, and there’s not much leeway on the money side. But yes, I will try and run interference so you can do whatever works.”

      That was the last good thing I heard all morning.

      2

      Grasping the Scope

      Before I left his office, Stu provided more details about the WindSailor.

      The WindSailor board was made from a relatively new fiberglass resin compound, and because of this the board needed to be painted with a special sealant that required a longer than normal curing time. Since I don’t know a great deal about the chemistry of reinforced plastics (or any chemistry at all), this didn’t mean much to me until Stu told me that this would place constraints on our manufacturing facility. Specifically, we would have to provide extra warehouse space СКАЧАТЬ