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How the Computer Services Industry Works    [ Humor ]

I started this while ago after finding an archive of one of my favorite posts to Slashdot, but I was inspired to finish it this afternoon. Hope you enjoy.

How the Computer Services Industry Works

by Eric Dobbs (original credit due to an Anonymous Coward post on Slashdot from October 1999)

You need to understand how the services industry really works.

The Vice-President doesn’t care if the project succeeds or not. If SOMETHING isn’t delivered on the target date that the board of directors gave him, he’s out the door.

The Director who reports to the VP doesn’t care if the project succeeds or not. Actually, he hopes it won’t, since when the VP gets canned, the Director hopes to be promoted. Meanwhile, the Director is going to do everything he can to help. Like scheduling seven hours a day of mandatory “fulfillment progress” meetings for the support staff and their supervisors. And “opening dialogs” with IT staffing agencies to help the managers with their resource management problems. And encouraging the users to attend the “Learn Windows 2000” courses so they can provide better feedback to the support analysts when they call up with “I can’t do online banking at work” questions.

The Managers who work for the Director don’t have time to care if the project succeeds because they are too busy interviewing the hordes of fresh technicians needed for the migration who may have touched their cousin’s computer, once, while he wasn’t looking. And since there’s roughly twice as many managers as there are permanent positions on the contract, they’re also jockeying for survival in a contest of Darwinian politics that make the worst of the Roman emperors look like decent and moral human beings who would be good to work for.

The Supervisors who work for the Managers don’t care about the project because they are too busy filling out the project status reports and the time sheets for the contract workers, attending the “configuration control board” meetings, and sitting on the “customer feedback” committee. In their spare time, they would ingest about two parts Maalox to one part solid food for lunch, except that they don’t get time for lunch nowadays. Half of them will either have a heart attack or leave to work as a checkout clerk at the local grocery store by the time the project’s over.

The users actually care about the project and are sure that it would succeed if the support staff would just pay more attention to their concerns. Don’t bother them with any techie nonsense about “migration priorities” or “turn off your machine at night”; they have feelings, too, and don’t like being ignored so that the admins can go play with the nasty dusty boxes in that old closet. And “I am going to escalate your refusal to solve my problem by sending email to your supervisor, your manager, your program director, and the President of the United States.”

The Project Consultants don’t care about the project since they are on loan from another department in the company that ran over its budget. They care about three things: keeping their billable hours at maximum, confiscating any available hardware for their test lab regardless of what it’s being used for, and seeing that something is installed on the delivery date. Since they’ll be shipped off to another project once it’s delivered, they are free to piss off everybody in sight. They won’t be around when the bomb explodes.

The administrators would like to care about the project. After all, they’re going to be stuck supporting this mess. But with the sudden influx of temporary and contract IT personnel, the admins are spending all of their time trying to explain where the documentation lives and why new systems are installed in the test environment first, not the production environment, and trying to actually get logins for the temps in the first place. If anyone had asked, the senior admin could have finished half the project in one night with a handful of Perl scripts, but he’s busy setting up network drops in the hallway for six new temporary technicians whose names he can’t pronounce or spell and one whom he is already about to kill. At least configuring drops serves as an excuse for avoiding the configuration control board meetings. Plus by the end of the day, all he wants to do is get home and fire up a network game of [ Warcraft | Age of Empires | Command & Conquer | Quake | Unreal ] and hammer the bejesus out of some hapless newbie who will be left twitching in front of their computer for half an hour.

The new temporary/contract technicians would also like to care about the project. And as soon as someone comes to their senses are replaces this horrible [ Compaq | Dell | IBM | HP | Sun ] box with a [ decent | larger ] [ Compaq | Dell | IBM | HP | Sun ] system and gives them rights to the admin software, they’ll be able to fix all these trouble tickets they keep getting. Obviously the admins don’t know what they’re doing since things keep breaking, so we went through and fixed all the problems we found. There’s no real difference between a Cisco router and a Marconi ATM switch anyway, and Solaris is just like Linux. Don’t ask me why everyone keeps yelling at us, they’re just stupid here.

The configuration manager cares about the project. But no one will even mention what’s happening until the day after go-live, and conversations about “the latest fiasco” are so common that she won’t notice until some desperate caffeine-crazed managers show up in front of her cubicle ten minutes before she leaves on Friday, ranting and frothing at the mouth about some deliverable that the customer needs. Now.

Oh, and the ordering department said that all the equipment was sitting on a pier in Bangladesh under ten feet of water. It’ll take at least two months to get replacement gear in here. Have a nice weekend!

And all vacations, training and time off has been cancelled.

And the company firewall is now blocking http requests to monster.com.

Posted by edobbs at December 9, 2002 05:40 PM