Chapter 10 - Day #2

(chapter 9, table of contents)

Friday, August 4th

FPP launch date - February 1st, next year

I returned to the FPP War Room at 3:55 the following afternoon, as agreed.

The walls were covered with flip chart paper and Post-it notes, the table with printouts and coffee cups. Gregor was busy typing, Vrinda was doing nothing in particular except looking grumpy, and Catherine wasn't there. Phil was busy snapping photographs of the walls using his phone. A stack of empty pizza boxes sat at the back of the room. Lunch or last night's dinner, I couldn't tell. I breathed in, and immediately wished I hadn't. If work had an odor, then I guess you could say the room smelled of work.

I placed a small box of cookies (made by Mom and the girls) on the table, then went to the far side of the room and forced open a couple of windows.

I asked Gregor if he had a plan.

He nodded. "It's aggressive but, I think, workable. We have some very busy months ahead of us, but we should make it."

I thought I saw Vrinda roll her eyes, but I wasn't sure.

Catherine returned and we all sat down. Gregor described how they'd come up with their plan. He said they'd started with the spreadsheet produced during their last descoping exercise earlier in the year. The spreadsheet listed all FPP's features and ranked them as must-haves, should-haves, could-haves and won't-have features. I'd always suspected Catherine had deliberately thrown in the won't-haves at the start of the project, so we'd have something to slash during the descoping exercise that almost always happened later on. At the end of the exercise last year, Catherine swore we'd cut every ounce of fat from her product, and some muscle as well.

Gregor snorted. "If that earlier exercise was a gentle descoping, then today's session was battlefield triage. We took far fewer prisoners this time, Steve."

Clearly pleased with the results, Gregor explained his triage approach. They had written every feature in the spreadsheet on its own little yellow sticky note, then scattered the dozens of sticky notes randomly across the breadth of the conference room's back wall. Then, they used a divide-and-conquer approach to force-rank every feature.

It went like this: Gregor had chosen one sticky note at random, the group had agreed it wasn't unusual in any way, and they placed it in the middle of the wall. Gregor called it the pivot feature—like on a set of old fashioned balancing scales. Then, one-by-one, they'd taken every other sticky note and asked if it was more or less valuable than the pivot feature. The more valuable features got moved to the left side of the wall, the less valuable to the right. The number of stickies wasn't evenly balanced, but that didn't matter. They repeated the process with the two halves until they'd ended up with the most important features, the must-must-haves*, *on the far left side of the wall, the must-haves sitting next to them, and so on.

Gregor said, "We paused at this stage to figure out what to do next. We concluded there must be some absolute bare minimum set of must-have features we needed before we can go live.

Catherine said, "I decided where that point was on the wall. We marked that point with the extra-large pink sticky note."

She pointed to the wall and I nodded, acknowledging the pink sticky note's presence.

"Okay." I went to the wall and scanned the sticky notes. They meant little to me—I didn't need to know the details in order to do my job—but I could see how, as I moved from left to right, the product built up feature-by-feature until it hit the pink sticky note. Even I could tell that the product truly was bare bones. Skeletal, even.

I was about to turn back to them when a horrible thought occurred to me. I looked around the room to see if there was another bunch of stickies. There wasn't.

I turned to Gregor. "There's no web work here."

He nodded, the corners of his mouth turning down even more than usual.

"You've descoped the web app?"

He nodded again.

I looked around the table, hoping one of my colleagues would burst out laughing at the little joke they'd played on me.

Silence.

I shook my head in disbelief. "Seriously? We're launching without a web app? People will laugh." I looked at Catherine. "Can we do that?"

She grimaced. "Yes, we can. We will look lame, but on the plus side, most sales will originate in our branches or, once we advertise, our call center."

I looked back at Gregor.

He said, "We don't have enough runway to launch with a web app by February."

I closed my eyes for a moment and took in a calming breath. "I'm so sorry, Catherine."

She shrugged. "It's not your fault, Steve. You didn't change the date. Circumstances did."

I turned to Gregor, and was pleased my voice stayed steady. That calming breath thing really works. "What did you do next?"

"Next," he said, "we developed a brand new project plan to build this bare minimum. We all agreed, by the way, that except for one exception which we will discuss later, it would slow us down if we tried to bring any new staff on to the project at this stage."

I nodded.

Gregor cleared his throat, as if he were about to make an announcement. "The new plan, to build up to the pink sticky, came in at just over fifteen weeks' work—most of it testing."

Catherine said, "If we went live with only the bare bones features, then our support processes would be a nightmare. We'd be better going live with spreadsheets. I needed those processes more than I needed a web app."

"I understand."

"So," Gregor said, "we added a few more really-really-should-have features until we had a plan that takes six months, including two weeks at the end for launch. Testing starts in five weeks."

I asked Catherine if she was happy with that.

"Happy? No. But what choice do I have?" She shook her head. "If FPP were a tricycle, maybe it would have three wheels and handlebars. But no seat. It's going to be an uncomfortable ride, but I can live with it until February, so long as we add the seat after that, in phase two."

She was right to assume that Eleanor and Mark had money ferreted away to fund FPP until the end of the following year. So, yes, in theory she would get her phase two. But realistically, we'd spend much of phase two fixing the stuff we got wrong in phase one. I decided to let her figure that out in her own time.

I turned to Gregor. "Are you confident you can achieve the date?"

He didn't respond straightaway. I watched as his eyes seemed to search for the answers somewhere near the back of his head, then he straightened his back, took a deep breath, and said, "Steve, it's an aggressive schedule, but if you're happy to pay the overtime, then I am confident it is achievable."

"Good." That was the gung-ho attitude I liked to see.

He let a tiny smile sneak out. "I'll announce compulsory paid overtime on Monday and I'll ask everyone to voluntarily cancel any holidays they have planned for the next six months. If I don't get enough volunteers, I'll cancel vacations."

"They'll hate you for that," Vrinda snapped at him. She'd been silent so far, which was unusual for her.

Gregor snapped back. "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, Vrinda. You do the analysis; I'll do the managing. We'll both be a lot happier."

She grimaced. "Yeah, right. A lot happier."

I intervened. "Look. If you two kids can't play nicely together then I'll send you to your rooms."

My words were light-hearted, my tone was not. I couldn't have the team falling apart before we'd even restarted the project. I looked each of them in the eye and they both said sorry, though clearly neither meant it. I changed the topic.

"This is good work, everyone. I'm pleased with what you've done. Now, what do you guys need from me?"

Gregor said, "We identified three obstacles for you to remove."

He turned to Tim, who said, "The first is test data. Every project I've worked on here has been hobbled by the lack of good test data. "

I nodded. That was true.

"It's hard setting up test data," Tim continued. "You need a broad knowledge of our existing systems as well as knowledge of the new application. The people who have that knowledge are considered too valuable to spend their time creating test data. "

"What would you like me to do, Tim?" I asked.

"This is the area where we could add new staff to the project without slowing everyone else down. We'd like a dedicated team established to set up test data. We need the team to be overstaffed so that they respond quickly—in minutes rather than weeks—to requests for new data. And, I'd like them not to complain about it."

I smirked. He was doing well until the last sentence and he knew it. "I guarantee you that you'll have a dedicated, overstaffed team by the end of next week." I'd draw people in from the business, and Catherine and Mark would pull a few strings if need be. "But I can't guarantee they won't complain. I'm no miracle worker. What's the second obstacle?"

Gregor said, "Catherine and her team sit with us, and it's been great having them so close when we have questions or issues. But we'd also like to have other customers, such as the actuaries and a representative from the marketing and documents team, working directly with us. We'd also like some of the periphery IS teams moved in, too. In particular, we'd like at least two DBAs sitting here with us."

"Good thinking," I said. I tried, with every project, to work as one colocated team, but despite my good intentions, I almost always failed. But FPP was different. It was corporate priority number one. If anyone complained when I wanted to move them, I'd threaten them with a call from the personnel department. And if that didn't work, I'd threaten them with a personal call from Halifax Gibbet himself. "I'll get facilities on the transfers immediately. It'll be done by Wednesday."

"In that case," interrupted Phil enthusiastically, "can you get us an FPP team espresso machine—a good one? This automatic dispensing machine coffee gives me heartburn, the tea has stuff floating in it, and it has whitener in it, not milk. It's a health risk."

He was, of course, being flippant. I said, "Is that your third obstacle?"

"No," Gregor stepped in. "We need a large dedicated meeting room. This conference room would be ideal. And we need whiteboards, plenty of whiteboards. And a large stock of whiteboard marker pens; they're as rare as hens' teeth around here and I'd hate to lose this battle for want of a marker pen."

"Done." I told them that Carol, my PA, had spent most of the morning moving meetings around specifically to free up space.

"As of today, this conference room is dedicated to FPP, as are three smaller meeting rooms. I'll get Carol to check, each day, that the meeting rooms are fully stocked with pens and other stationary." Sometimes it's the small things that matter the most.

I straightened the papers in front of me then looked around the table, making certain to catch everyone's eye.

"Thanks, everyone. You've done good work these last two days." I stood. "And now I want you all to go home and enjoy your weekends. I'll see you all at Monday morning's team meeting."

As everyone stood, I caught Vrinda's eye and asked her quietly, "Can you walk with me?"

She glanced at Gregor. He was packing papers into boxes and didn't look in our direction.

Quietly—meekly, might be a better word—she said, "Yes."