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:
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 for the curing process. This space had to be part of, or connected to, the manufacturing space. The boards could not be transported very far, and certainly not outside, after they had been sealed.
According to Leslie Frame in marketing, who had been in Europe working with the WaterTrends people, we expected to sell about 2,600 WindSailors in the first year, at a price of about $1,600 each. Although that meant only a ten percent sales increase at Hyler, Leslie was projecting sales of almost $10 million by the third year. That represented a significant chunk of money for the company.
The Europeans had introduced the WindSailor in only a few geographic areas in late July, having missed their first-of-the-season target date by a wide margin (my ears pricked up when I heard that), so they did not have much marketing data to go on. The response in those selected areas, however, had been impressive. Their initial run of 2,500 boards sold out within four weeks, and they had back orders for next year equal to three-quarters of their production capacity. They were increasing their capacity to meet what they hoped would be an even greater demand next season.
Leslie estimated that by purchasing the North American manufacturing and distribution rights to the WindSailor, Stu had given Hyler a least a full year’s head start on any North American competition, and on other European manufacturers who might try to export to our market. Since this was a brand-new product, Leslie figured that this head start would give us market dominance over any competing boards for as much as three years, more if our marketing and promotion efforts were done well.
There was, of course, a catch that Stu seemed almost happy to relate. Leslie and the WaterTrend folks in Germany figured it would take the competition about 16 to 18 months to design, test, and produce a board that would get around the WindSailor patent protection and compete head to head with our product.
“So you see,” said Stu, “we have to get our WindSailor into the marketplace before the end of next summer.” It was now August. “That leaves you almost ten months. No problem!” He actually reached across the desk and slapped me on the shoulder.
No problem. Design the new facility, build it, buy all the equipment, and get it running properly in less than ten months. As I thought about this, I became even more appreciative of the fact that we were located near Portland, where it does not snow and you can do construction work all year.
Our distribution