Thursday, March 13, 2008

Loud Suits

As you might (correctly) assume, MegaCorp is a large firm with a large IT group who do computer/geek stuff'for the 'business'.
The 'business' is a sort of club, where the Suits do their bidding and they're the ones that earn millions and millions of dollars (NB: geeks that make clever computer systems to enable the Suits to work don't 'make' money).
The Suits 'pay' the IT group via a bewildering & complex system of chargeback and subscriptions (well, something has got to keep the beancounters busy), so they consider themselves the owners of the IT group. That's "own" in the same way you might own a labrador or a pony.
The Suits frequently dictate, usually at short notice, that they MUST have WidgetX and they want it yesterday.
Of course, the non-Dims will go through a painful process of attempting to extract real facts from the Suits about WidgetX and how it might work with FlangeABC, but that's something I'll write about another day.

Remember that the Dims are afraid of the Suits. When a Suit unreasonably declares an arbitrary date for WidgetX to go live, they'll simply shout until they get an agreement from the Dims.
If the Suit doesn't get the date they want, they'll shout a bit louder. Then they'll "escalate" to another, slightly more 'important' Suit and the circle begins once more.
Eventually, either the next level of Suit will be growing his/her carbon footprint and so be unavailable to provide louder shouting, or, a Dim will cave-in and attempt to become a Dim-climber by appearing to be 'sensitive to needs of the business'.
Of course, the Dims are shackled by process and procedure put into place by the dimwatchers, the aim of which is to ensure that there is no 'risk' to the business.

The final irony and frustration is...

  • after the non-Dims have worked around various technical issues with clever code
  • after the Dims have jumped through the dimwatchers hoops
  • the 'go live' is an unstoppable certainty
... the Suits will decide that they'd rather play golf/go on a jolly/something and the date will change resulting in lots of wasted effort, time, energy.

He who shouts loudest gets his own way, even if he is plain wrong.

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