Once upon a time I was a buck Partner at an international consulting firm, or maybe Partner First Class but definetely way down the totem pole. Project fodder, really. And for reasons still unclear to me I was given the unenviable assignment to parachute into a truly catastrophic large scale sysems and reengineering project for a major telecommunications company that will remain nameless because they have a lot of lawyers who know where I live.
Well, long story made short our client service partner at said Telco had managed to combine the alienation of half of he client's top management with really, really lousy project management and garnish it with apparently random but destructive last minute design changes and the odd 'strategic' 'untruth'. At $4 million a month. I've never ever had an experience - before or since - where I've been yelled at, cursed and cried at by different execs all in the same day. It was that kind of gig. Of course my 'heroic' efforts (primarily hiding in the men's room until the worst was over) to save the project came a cropper and we were ignonimously chucked out on our ear (quite right IMHO). I've never really seen anything quite like it.
Until this frosty morn when while finishing my McDonalds flapjacks and sausage I read the Washington Post. In the touchingly naive way that only very bright 'light workers' who have never implemented anything bigger than the gas in their SUV can do, they outlined the difficulties that the Political Achievement formerly known as Obamacare and before that as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Peepahkaaah) were having. Reading the lilting cadences of official Washington I was transported instantly back to the phone company.
Some things were different: instead of a $60 Million project it was a $634 million project. And instead of one outside contractor (us! us!) they had about 50. But the basics of the fiasco were the same: half of the client execs enraged and opposed (the Republican half), absolutely no project management - not even a person called a project manager, lunatic last minute changes, and a whole stack of 'strategic untruths' told to top mangement and critical customers until the very end. Same story, different verse at 10X the price. But of course this is our Federal Government so whaddya expect?
Well for one thing, I didn't expect that WAPO would call O'care/PPACA Barack Obama's 'top acheivement'. I mean how can you describe a world class fiasco as one's acheivement? The ring tone chaps would never have dreamed of representing our project to the Board as such and had the financial press gotten wind of it they would have scourged, nailed, speared and otherwised crucified the phonies (and us) for it. Everyone wanted to forget it so much that they fired us in a way that got us paid lots of penalty money. They wouldn't dream of calling it an 'achievement'.
And for another thing, they lacked the raw chutzpah to come up with the novel notion of blaming the uninvolved half of the executive team for the project's failure to build consensus and a design that supported the entire company's needs. the half that just happened to have no control the project at the point of initiation. And they sure as heck wouldn't think that the Board would ever, ever believe that the executives who had opposed the project, had no say in its design, had not selected the contractors and had not been involved during the build could be held responsible for the result. Anyone who had suggested such a ridiculous thing would have had their thorazine drip doubled.
In other words: calling the somewhat less than catastrophic initiation of a major project an 'acheivement' and the tarring of the uninvolved, essentially powerless opponents of the project as the villains responsible for the fiasco is a creative leap that would literally be beyond the (non-deranged) imagination of any senior private executive that I have known during my long and quite checkered career. But it seems to be par for the course in Washington where the Glorious Federal Superstate exerts so much gravitational force that it literally bends reality.
And I'm afraid that there's no men's room big enough for us all to hide in until this blows over. God help us every one.
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