Opinion: The issues the CrowdStrike Incident brings to mind

We are not all perfect

In my 36^th year of a career in Information Computer Technology of which more than two-thirds have been as a freelance consultant, even in Nigeria where some thought it folly to abandon a salaried role for the uncharted waters of treading the streets of Lagos and beyond for engagement, I have been quite fortunate.

I would be the first to say every seemingly subject matter expert has a history and that is in keeping with the credo that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. My recognition of some of the stupidest things to do in any IT environment allows me to reflect on the imperfections, errors, ignorance, overconfidence, mistakes, and failings of experts. Critically, we should learn lessons more and excoriate ourselves less.

CrowdStrike’s bird strike

However, on Friday I was hoping so much that my weekend would not be ruined by the incident of an event that we would need to remediate, especially when what caused it was totally out of our control. I refer to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident where a US cybersecurity company rolled out a faulty update to their software which affected an estimated 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices.

In the process, we saw this affecting airlines, airports, hospitals, banks, hotels, payment systems, government services, enterprise systems, and emergency services, among the critical services the CrowdStrike software is widely deployed to protect.

The more technical people have already analysed the issue and several solutions have been proffered including an emergency recovery tool that Microsoft released late yesterday to help fix devices that have been left in an unusable state. [Microsoft: New Recovery Tool]

How ever did this happen?

In my view, I am shocked that this CrowdStrike update happened and calls for a reassessment of how we measure impact, risk, and consequence when what we do can be so far-reaching and the means to back out or roll back a presumed solution requires extraneous measures.

If anything, and I have been involved in major deployments that could reach up to 250,000 users globally, you do not roll out a major update on a Friday and I never do on a Monday either. You need the presence of mind and personnel active during the week if things go wrong.

Before that, all techies are left asking, how did such a fundamentally flawed update make it out of the gates at CrowdStrike without being caught in testing, review, change management, risk management, impact assessment, and just the basic corporate desire never to roll out a problem regardless of the situation?

Preoccupied with the stock market

I got one interesting insight looking through the Twitter (X) feed of the President & CEO CrowdStrike, his last tweet was quoting another before pandemonium broke loose on the 8^th of July, and it was the ululation about CrowdStrike being the seventh best-performing stock in the Nasdaq 100 year-to-date and the 14th best in the S&P 500. In both indices, it is the highest returning software stock of the first half of 2024, up over 50%.

[Tweet]

CrowdStrike seemed to be a celebratory mode and last month they celebrated 5 years of being Nasdaq-listed, I hate to think that they had taken their eyes off the ball and by some careless misadventure, a company that was supposed to prevent cyberattacks presided over one of the largest outages ever in the history of information technology.

It leads me to think of the nursery rhyme, Sing a song of sixpence where the king specifically had a counting house to count his money and the maid suffered the mishap of having a blackbird which would have been one of the four-and-twenty birds that were baked in the pie which escaped when the pie was opened and the birds began to sing. Things were not particularly right in that kingdom.

Falconry gone to ground

That this outage affected airports and airlines globally is quite interesting because the update was to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor product. This was a vulnerability scanner that rendered devices totally inoperable. Certain airports deploy falcons to scare away birds that might interfere with the take-off and landing of aircraft. They prevent catastrophic bird strikes that could incapacitate aircraft and lead to accidents.

I find myself thinking CrowdStrike had become a bird strike of unimaginable consequence that the cost of the outages is yet to be computed as many devices might still be offline. CrowdStrike stock price fell almost 20% in the 5 days to the Friday close of the market. The king of CrowdStrike counting his money just over a week before just took a personal hit of $43 million it might be up to $300 million according to Forbes. Not much for a billionaire though.

Ticking boxes and flipping heck

Back to the fundamentals, the question about testing remains as much as I am left wondering what product, service, or project manager needed to tick boxes to meet deadlines over rolling out a patch later than planned to achieve something. Siding with the techies rather than management, could the management have been given different advice, but the techie was overruled for expediency purposes?

I have had these conversations too many times with project managers who have promised the world to management long before they have engaged the input of resources and facilities to get things done to the standard they have promised. The resource is then put in a bind to meet unrealistic deadlines.

You need a force of personality to push back and assert that your job is to deploy solutions that work the first time, maybe with a few tweaks, but you would never roll out what you can determine with all clarity still has issues and can constitute a problem. I do not want to screw up anyone’s project, but I have a professional responsibility to those I provide service and support to not to leave the state of their corporate devices any worse than before my solution was deployed.

Push back and regulation too?

Better late than sorry is not a sin, it is understanding the impact and risk of what you do. One last thing, the update should have gone out in controlled tranches, not globally in one fell swoop. I can see a situation where legislation might require those who can impact critical services to submit a full assessment and deployment plan to a regulator before deployment.

We might be a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), or a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) type agency at national, regional, and international global levels to superintend services that can affect global infrastructure along with teeth to regulate, sanction, or punish those who handle their impactful responsibilities with levity.

Now, give the cat some milk

A backroom Rottweiler

Nothing can be as irksome as interlopers encroaching on the areas of expertise of others to usurp a situation. A 33-year career in Information Technology leaves you too aware of many things that you find yourself restraining yourself from stating the bleeding obvious short of lacing your apparent vitriol with expletives.

In my profession, whilst I am engaged as subject matter expert, I prefer to stay in the background and feed my line management with the information and arguments they need to make to the business or entities for what we want to do. Where I do attend meetings, I am conscious of the fact that where the comfortable are being comforted the more and the afflicted suffer even more grievous affliction, I come to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

Don’t project your failure

That is why a project manager who thinks they can bend everyone to their will would hate an encounter with me because I do not mince words, I say things others might never find the phraseology to express.

Like when one said we have to work weekends if need be and I retorted, we all have lives outside of the work, that weekends could not be seized on without due consideration. I might have gone on to say it was a failure of core project management not to have properly assessed the time, resources, and cost to complete a project because no one talked to the people who mattered.

They really work you up

Teams are engaged to solve problems or create solutions as a daily activity, yet someone somewhere in the organisation rather than come round to discuss the scenario they need a solution for, they craft elaborate and pointless solutions not properly understanding the problem in the first place and put our backs up creating unnecessary angst.

If I had any hairs to pull out, I would be pulling clumps out daily. You wonder why they fancy themselves in our roles just to have the satisfaction of activity without achievement. If I were to direct my ire at them, I go on an exploration of the English putdown that acts like slow poison. Do I recall when someone was giving me grief and my one-line response was, “This situation has moved on from personalities to providing a solution.” Now, give the cat some milk. 

South Africa: Again?

All going south

Just this morning after the regular telephone conference which is never without event and surprise, I sprang out of my seat and saunter across the aisle to announce to my colleagues the newest development.

Our project had reached an impasse and with all the problems we were having, the business was ready to can the whole deal, 22 months of my work about to go up the swanny.

To say I foresaw these long ago will be to boast, but email after email presents an audit trail of insight and understanding garnered over almost 30 years in the field, but generally Project Managers know best until fiction meet reality in a collision that will make the Big Bang a simple puff of smoke.

It was forgettable enough

We had ventured that I will be needed in South Africa to confirm my obsolescence to the project by my handing over the engineering environment to the local support teams. I am already used to being important at the start of a project and then being expendable after I have created a working solution.

Any freelance consultant will be used to this kind of cycle and I have been doing this for 20 years. Whilst they were counting the pennies about whether I was needed or not in South Africa, I had already concluded that nothing will come of it, if ever, and not on this side of Christmas.

A similar desire to have me visit was first mooted in October last year, it took them until May to finally get it sorted, I was not going to put my life on the hold for this, I have not had an annual holiday since September last year.

Wham! What happened?

Then hardly two hours after the telephone conference, I received an email asking me to visit and attend brainstorming sessions in South Africa next week. My line manager, I have many, in fact, there are many lines of management in my purview, I might well be snorting lines of something else to keep informed of who is managing me now.

Yes, my line manager wanted me to be in South Africa on Monday, it could be done and since I do not have that kind of outlay, I could have had someone else fork out a king’s ransom on a golden landau to Johannesburg, but I am a very reasonable man.

I have seen a better deal for the midweek and I have learnt better of getting hotels too and I have forwarded the information to another line manager who holds the purse strings. I will be out to South Africa until the middle of December.

The feats are beats

There is no scope for me to hate my job, the uncertainties, the surprises, the unpredictability and the madhouse order in the perfect chaos of achieving the impossible with the Project Management tools of hope in the midst of hopeless recklessness.

This is where faith is leaping over gullies filled with the imponderables and the incredulity of starved crocodiles half sated at the sight of you attempting the daring-do of death wish – I am overwhelmed with the excitement of constant change and I guess in the scheme of things, it is fun too.

I hope I like South Africa better than the first time.

The Project Dilemma Triangle

It is as constant as life itself

I have written about this many times before, my battles with Project Managers who do anything but manage the project.

During my postgraduate course, I took the Project Management module and we were tested not by the methodology, but by the problems with personnel in the sub-group that we were in.

Each person had a deliverable within the project assignment and some received wisdom suggested that we put a time frame on when that task had to be completed after which the task was taken away from the allottee if not completed and given to someone else to complete.

A reality project course

In our team of five, one just did not pull his weight and when we took over his task and completed it, he threatened to report us for ostracism and discrimination. I withstood him at all points of this attempt to blackmail us pointing out his responsibility and apparent lack of consideration for others even if he just wanted to get by rather than excel as the rest of us did.

Meanwhile, our lecturer was watching our exchanges and in the end commended me for handling such a difficult situation calmly, respectfully and decisively. We did not make a distinction for that module, but the biggest lesson I took away from that experience was that I did not want to be a project manager.

A common-sense experience

27 years in the Information Technology profession has taught me a few home truths and it is best illustrated in what I now call The Project Dilemma Triangle.

The angles of the triangle labelled are labelled Good, Fast and Cheap, and from that I have developed a number of truisms. A very commonsensical view of projects without the attendant jargon or obfuscation with meaningless terminology.

Much as I strive to do the very best job I can, I am constrained by time, by cost, sometimes by knowledge I still have acquire and mostly by project managers with unrealistic expectations. The project managers I have worked best with are those who have taken the time to come to understand what I am doing, what I am thinking and what it takes to create a deliverable that works at implementation the very first time.

I battle daily

However, because the time and the cost is usually determined long before understanding what the work entails, the technical resource is in a bind. We are compelled to work within the constraints of the Fast and Cheap to achieve the Project Manager’s goal of the Fast and Good with everyone pretending that the Fast and Cheap will be Good and Fast. It is never the case.

Where Fast is delivering on time and Cheap is doing it on a shoestring with Good being the minimum we can get away with that appears to work, we find that we do never really get it right the first time even if the Project Manager ticks it off as delivered and the technical resource is still left with that ‘delivered’ project, firefighting issues and problems that should never have been there is the time and scope was there to get it right from the get-go.

That sums up my daily work life and the battles I am constantly fighting with Project Managers in The Project Dilemma Triangle.

A reactivated network of sleepers

The return of the rummy

The project has been reactivated but uncertainties persist. It feels like a spy network of sleepers called back into service. Sometimes I wonder if I could have been a better gentleman and for the way I have been treated walked away from this debacle before I was twice bitten and messed up again.

July and August is serious holiday time in the Netherlands, even our transport services adapt their timetables to cater for reduced traffic, even the public works agencies schedules their infrastructure maintenance for these times, closing railways, bridges, tunnels, roads and many other services.

In effect, things move a bit slowly and the uptake for new opportunities is rare, though I have had quite a few jobs begin in July and August when I think of it.

Memory not well served

We have to make the best of the situation; the quids need to roll in as it does take a while for one to get back on an even keel after all that has happened over the last year.

I was welcomed back, we shook hands and shook heads but no one felt culpable, there would be new faces in charge who have to get up to speed by chatting to us or just speed past by ignoring us and then be brought back to the reality of things.

As for where we left off, my memory recalls a few passwords and it has lost others, they will all be reset and we might just get back into the flow of the politics, the meetings, the coffees and the excitement of executions, rollbacks, roll-forwards, escalations, priorities and typical office experiences of order in the midst of great anarchy.

For the most important thing, is my pocket square coordinated with my tie? Only just.

A recall I obtain

No faffing about

I did not waste my time in deciding to go on holiday immediately after learning that the project I was on was suspended literally without warning or notice; things were just up in the air.

It meant bringing my holiday forward a good 6 weeks in the height of summer heat as I had planned that Gran Canaria would be the place to return to.

The general idea was whilst the companies sorted out the considerations and goals of the project we had the freewill to seek other opportunities or wait out the possibility of recall for the month of August.

Courtesies with recalls

This morning I got notice that we were being recalled to the project but I missed the basic courtesy of expressed regret at the way matters were handled, those in permanent employment would simply have been reassigned to other duties, and people like me in self-employment were just left high and dry.

Surely, there should be a sense of gentlemanliness in the conduct of business and it appears certain conditions will be written into the recall to ensure we are not met with this kind of situation again.

The Englishman in me was a bit miffed but again glad that I did not have to visit the job market so soon seeking new opportunities.

Expectations and abilities

We expect the details to be fine-tuned and finalise over the next couple of weeks and hopefully we can return to doing what we know best to do; take on challenging projects, offer working solutions and deliver excellent results.

One question remains for me though, should I retain my Wednesdays off or stretch myself for the 40-hour week – it has been over 5 months after chemotherapy, I feel good and strong though still not as fit as I once was – it might just be smart to take things easy, doing my best over 4 days is probably better than petering out over 5 days.

Meanwhile, a week of holidays still remains with a trip to the island of Tenerife tomorrow, the alarm is going off at 04:45 hours, surely, I should still be in bed then.

Technical tinkerers are the worst

Taking calls for old jobs

Late last week, having left a project in which my contribution was critical, I got a call from the project manager about some issues that they had encountered and were having problems resolving.

I agreed to take calls from the technical people and see what I could do to help. When the call finally came through and I was told what they had encountered my intuition and experience just felt it was a non-problem that had been complicated by unnecessary tinkering on the one end and a basic inability to understand abstraction with technologies.

A template is a template is a template

The environment we built provides for the ability to document the settings on one environment using a portable format and wizard assisted method in an export process and the using the same wizard to import the settings into another environment.

This follows a basic template format which allows for common elements to be transferred but requires that some unique elements be edited to reflect the new environment. All those elements had been documented.

One of those elements deals with recording the status of the environment, but the references are not updated and hence technicians cannot check the state of the environment for operational effectiveness – the simple solution is to delete the foreign references and select the local references.

Tinkerers are the worst technical people

Now, I know technicians like to see what goes on under the bonnet; I have no problems with that. I like to know how a television works because I studied electronic engineering but I don’t at a whim go poking a screw-driver in the back of my television just because it is fun, I could be electrocuted, quite easily, even if I knew exactly what I was doing.

I sometimes give deference to the simple notice – No user serviceable parts – I wonder if that appears on modern equipment nowadays, I suppose the warning is more the risk of losing your warranty if you try to tinker with the innards of your equipment.

After the conversation ended, I just knew the smart guy had tinkered with the template directly and wrecked the environment and was now looking for assurances that if he continued that dastardly act the functionality of the environment could be guaranteed.

The absence of logic and reason

Since I was away from home, I could not simulate the conditions he was describing, in fact, I should have asked at the beginning what symptoms had been presented to them before the tinkering started.

The problem with many technicians and engineers today is that they lack analytical skills, they’ll rather tinker and test unsound assumptions with trial and error – they might eventually solve the problem but you can never get them to walk you through the problem discovery to problem resolution because the critical ingredient for analysis is logic and reasoning and that is usually missing.

I fear something in the educational system has deprived many technical personnel of the ability to just stand back, review the situation, work out scenarios, dry run possible resolutions and test assumptions against sound logic. They can see what but never seem to know how or why.

They have to be seen doing something and thinking is not part of doing something, it is scary, I can assure you it is – because what ends up happening is every single issue requires a complete rebuild once they hit a bottleneck - that is time and money.

Doing it right the first time

From my wealth of experience, I have rarely had to rebuild anything I have built myself because of the time taken to understand what I am doing in the first place. However, in many cases I have had to rebuild what others have done because it becomes evident that certain omissions in the construction process are critical to the operation or performance of that environment and that omission cannot be corrected in live systems.

I am sometimes left completely exasperated by the lack of meticulous application of technical expertise in some of these places, I take my time because my philosophy is what is worth doing at all is worth doing well - the first time.

Yes, he did

Anyway, I was called by the project manager again today to arrange another meeting with the technical people and somehow they had tried to call me a couple of times during the day, well, the reason why I had not gotten the call was because the tinkerer had transcribed my number wrongly.

So, we chatted and I had to get the first bit of information out of him, indeed, he had edited the template directly – I simply said, I cannot believe that you edited the XML file, anyone should know that an automatically generated file is not there for tinkering.

Basically, even if you can identify the elements that need changing, there is no telling what other related elements are linked by coded or encrypted values, but in true cowboy fashion, he had edited the file and corrupted the environment.

Now, there is no way how I could then engage in a conversation with this tinkerer on the level of an experienced and learned technician with the expertise to distinguish himself properly.

And indeed, the conversation did get to a point where he remonstrated that he had not just started working with these environments and I was getting irritated with what was turning out to be an abject waste of my time.

The impossible question

By the time we got to the end of the conversation, he wanted to know if he could trust the environment he had built, well, I trust the environment I built, I trust the use of templates to transfer settings and I trust my ability to leave black boxes alone if I decide to use wizards to perform otherwise time-consuming activities.

I could not vouch for his skills or expertise and in the end, he decided I was not helpful at all, I am glad it ended that way because I would be an idiot to vouch for the kind of stuff he had been doing.

I called the project manager and gave him a piece of my mind asking that next time I would rather converse with others with constrained cowboy tendencies whilst intimating him of the fact that my time had really been wasted almost unforgivably.

Some so-called administrators should never be let near critical infrastructure for the sanity of the bigger world.

Gosh! I am quite pissed off

As irritable as itch

Wow! There is a possibility that I am getting quite irritable for all sorts of reasons but mostly to do with work.

No doubt, there is a lot to do and it could be ground-breaking and rather interesting work but for some of the people I have to deal with to get things done.

Only yesterday we had a chat with the people that matter about my clearly stated intention to leave, I had come to the conclusion I could not get things done the way I want if there was not a root and branch realignment of perspectives of many of the people I need to fulfil my contracted goals.

I do understand that if the solutions were easy they would have been put in place easily, however, maybe a radical shake-up is required such that the fossils who have congealed into nay-sayer back-stoppers who cannot see beyond the noses of their perspective of things regardless of the business requirements can be given the heave-ho for fresh air to aerate our determined purpose.

In the end, I intimated that my decision about continuance would be revealed when I return from Barcelona.

Many bulls one china shop

One would expect that the project manager appreciates the precariousness of the moment and he would be a bit tactful so as not to push me off the edge, but therein is my naivety.

As I tried to conclude activities to close for my break, a call came from our man with suggestions that our product which meets the required security standards must be deprecated because some regional office has been caught in the unfavourable situation of having written code that now fails the security test.

I was having none of it, you do not change the sea because your boat would not float, you sort out your boat; but no matter how forcefully I stated that position I was getting this monotone of angst.

Basically, it would have involved undoing a good-month’s work to accommodate a situation that would be forcefully changed in weeks to meet the setup being rejected.

I tell you, I was having none of it; I would not have someone rubbishing my deliverables in order to shoehorn a flailing project into an atrocious schedule.

I’m done with this

Anyway, the emotion of anger gained traction and the conversation ended with my offer to walk out with immediate effect and my returning Monday-week to clear my desk.

I tell you, this man just knows how to push my irrational, uncompromising, completely fed-up, annoy-me-seriously buttons like he has spent 1,000 hours in an Akin-simulator looking for the bugs.

Courtesy however requires that I inform the big boss of these expletive throwing developments as he calms me down for a cup of Espresso-Choc and we decide that a talk is required when I return – I sure believe I am just as much as done with this job, sadly, it would have been a job that could have been completed better but for …

Now to pack my bags and probably seek succour in the Sagrada Familia tomorrow evening.

A project for colourful analogy

Tautology of analogy

Somehow, I have become a master of analogies when it comes to understanding and explaining topics, ideas, issues or circumstances in my profession.

The project I am currently involved in is another classic in the many projects I have embarked upon where the salient lesson ends up being how not to do projects.

Interestingly, NaijaBlog highlighted issues with poor project management in Nigeria, but I can say that it is no better in Europe.

What is amazing is that we have professional project managers with Prince 2, Princess 3, Queen 4, King 5 and Emperor 6 project management qualifications but not an iota of genius has materialised from such great learning.

All sold on a whim

The first analogy stemmed from the situation where the project managers through their boss announced to their corporate community that they would deliver a product for live deployment in 2 weeks – no problem with that – however, if the project managers have not consulted their core resources, of which I was one, about that possibility, they would have sold a luxury car without having first seen the prototype.

I have read my CV over and over again, I have not found the words miracle or worker anywhere on the CV, in fact, this blog contains the first instance of those two words in such close proximity when talking of myself.

Then, there is the other part where it appears this project which is an activity of centralising and consolidating the business and resources to one country, there are many all around the place who have basically been deliberately sabotaging the project not to talk of the fact that there are so many chiefs in the canoe, not one space for the overworked Indian to row the boat.

Stunned at the sight of Medusa

However, this is the big picture, somehow, we all have paintbrushes with the mind that we are all together painting a figure whose name starts with M, some are expecting something serene, enduring and captivating like Mona Lisa; some are so clueless, they are making a Mess; some dare to fantasise and think it would be Marilyn Monroe with the air up her skirt, however, at the unveiling, we ended up with Medusa, such that we were shocked to stone – that is real-life project management as I have seen it in many enterprises.

My weekends are my weekends

In view of the poor project management and the atrocious impediments of staff that have thwarted every purpose we have tried to assert not to talk of the how 10-minute job have taken the best part of 10-hours with no resolution in sight, someone has the temerity to request my presence for the weekend – fat chance.

I rarely do weekends at work, not for the money not for the fun, my weekends are for myself especially if the whole week has milked 10 hour days – something has to give and what should give is a revelation of rotten project management and planning, more so, those who demand so many hours are out of the door before the clock chimes five.

Did I say that?

Twice, I have blurted out an expletive in utter exasperation bordering on apoplexy, how is it that these people just do not seem to look like the ordinary man in the street?

Joined-up thinking is just as rare as joined-up writing, though in spite of it all, I would deliver a product that is fit for purpose catering for my customer base which includes the users, the administrators and the enterprise.

I have another month of doing this stuff, the lesson would be well learnt – How not to do projects.

A short misery of projects

Preamble

Having just concluded a module on my MSc course pertaining to Project Management, I was given the opportunity to discuss one project that suffered seriously from the interference of politics.

I rose to the occasion with this tome.

The Facts

My ex-boss - Arthus Gratedane - pseudonym - was a rabid political dog, the day was not made if someone somewhere in the organisation had not received the political equivalent of a body slam.

Anyway, in this case we had at the head-quarters of a mainly European company constituted the Infrastructure Programme Management team at just one level below the CIO office and we had opportunities for innovation and improvement of services in the organisation.

We had only recently notched up a success with the implementation of a secure remote access solution which allowed users access to their data and standard applications from any internet connection if they had their secure token.

This created a launch pad to take on many more daring projects.

Then we started with Strauss which was a new desktop environment based on Windows XP, a new domain structure based on Windows 2000 Active Directory Services and Microsoft Exchange 2000 for email.

One particular trait Mr Gratedane had was a complete unwillingness for different teams to interact, especially if they were not teams he himself built. This for us was a kind of advantage, but in general made our work ever more difficult.

This meant our well-intentioned plans met with resistance with the local support teams around the Netherlands. Mr Gratedane solved that problem by advocating the centralisation of administrative services, thus making the core expertise of the regional teams redundant and retaining only box shifters.

We were to conduct an aggressive take-over of all that disparate infrastructure then recruit new staff and handover that infrastructure to the new staff within three weeks; which we did.

Then that gave us the opportunity to railroad the Strauss solution throughout the Netherlands without subjecting the solution to a decent pilot.

What should have been a resounding success was panned and criticised not because of the quality but because of how it was implemented through management aggression and the lack of consideration.

Managers in other departments just resisted anything that was in the interest of the company that came from any team managed by Mr Gratedane, but he had the ear of the executives in everything he did so people left rather than engage him.

When it came to rolling out Strauss to other European countries with Austria being the first, we encountered the fact that we could not sell Strauss to Austria, so the project was changed to the Hydra PC project.

The people in Austria were primed to act, any minor issue was a complete showstopper, it was so frustrating and nerve-racking.

Austria already had an advanced implementation that pre-existed Strauss by at least 6 months and the company could have used that solution quite easily all around Europe, but not on Mr Gratedane's watch.

We ended up implementing a parallel system in Austria with people logging into two environments for services and data, sometimes on two PCs.

Our implementation was a very poor alternative and received even less accolades, however, we, the team had to find ways of interacting with other teams without the knowledge of the boss to help facilitate issues and make things work.

The unfortunate political atmosphere in the company, which thrived on empire building, finger-pointing and atrocious escalations lead to unnecessary waste of resources, ideas, goodwill and productivity.

As an observer it looked like company had more competition between the departments than with their competitors. If that energy had been directed to more positive things, it could have yielded probably 10% to 20% company growth year on year.

The Figures

One must say that Mr Gratedane always got sponsorship for all his projects and all were fully implemented with varying degrees of success.

We probably had more project managers than project executors at one time.

The document churn rivalled that of a newspaper house with presentations about every little detail. [1]

The Failings

What created failing projects even though they were delivered as described and intended were the following

• The stakeholder, sponsor and senior project manager were the same person
• Project Managers were pen-pushing administrators [2] who were not allowed to model or method processes despite the fact that they were PRINCE 2 educated or at times certified – things were done on the whim of the sponsor – Mr Gratedane
• Responsibility and opportunity was taken for everything that went right, no matter how trivial but blame was quickly averted for problems - A typical, its my baby isn't it beautiful? Its our baby smiling, but its your baby crying - syndrome.
• The perception of risk was minimal except for where there were competing interests within the company, then the quest to excel and deliver at breakneck speed was tempered with a bit of reasoning
• The executors were hardly part of the assessment, decision or specification process, they were talked down to never communicated with
• The Human Resource element thrived on motivating staff by threatening their jobs and irrelevance, never by encouraging them to do their best
• Solutions were always delivered but the expense of goodwill and acceptance

More so, I really felt for the project managers caught in the middle of the megalomania and the chaos. Since I left in July, Mr Gratedane has become the ex-boss of 7 other senior infrastructure personnel.

This is the least palatable face of company politics and I have only reviewed on of the many.

References

Project Victim Support archives – mine.

[1] Alexis' PowerPoints were her shoulder pads...

http://akin.blog-city.com/read/389826.htm

[2] The Pen Pushers Posse Pogrom

http://akin.blog-city.com/read/436628.htm