I think I prefer to stay inside/BWE

In which our Hero is forced to show his hand and the client only barely knows what just hit them

In the middle of her busy Friday a few weeks ago, Nocturne stopped online to ask how my presentation had gone. The presentation that I’d been working on for a week, into the small hours of the very same morning.

“A home run, I guess.”

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Kind of empty right now. Glad to get to talk to you though.”

See, I’m a consultant. I have only as much authority as the client chooses to give me. I can give commands, but nobody is required to listen. I can write designs, but they are subject to the approval of every affected manager with their own agenda. Usually, when I hit a client site, it’s just a function of being the new guy, and frequently without a bit of related experience on my resume. But here, I have a track record of, forgive the humility, unrelenting success and bloody-minded genius. I’ve carried their projects to completion, on time, on budget, over and over. They’re running at least six major systems that I have built for them, ignoring the ones that I’ve advised under the roses, that have delighted their customers, and startled their users, and I’ve done it when they themselves haven been able to even articulate what they need, or worse, are telling me what they think they need despite the fact that they don’t know enough to know why what they’re asking for won’t help them.

But I’m not one of them. I’m an outsider, and so for all that the village is safe and warm thanks to me, their hired general, they treat me as if at any moment I’m going to start defiling their wives and goats. I have to prove myself every time, and I don’t entirely mind it because it means that at least there’s some driver for me to try to stay just a little bit professional, and I accept it because I am a professional and my challenge is to give them what they need, which includes the proving.

So for this project, I did something these people weren’t expecting. Imagine you’re building a highway between two cities. What I did was add paved area with ramps to get on and off the highway. Necessary? No, not right now. But if the weather gets bad, we may want a place to put a rest stop. And if we decide we just want to take advantage of the long distance between places because we know people will need to fill up, we’re going to want a rest stop. And hey, we’re paving anyway, so we *could* do it later, but right now we have budget, and we have time and we have people, and later we don’t expect to have all those things.

Well, this really offended the manager who handles support, the guy who has to take on all the stuff I build. He just couldn’t accept that we were doing this extra work, so we had to have a review with him. He’s not the chief architect, but he’s the guy who will whine a lot so that apparently makes him a stakeholder. And I didn’t even defend my idea. I just changed the things that he could explicitly object to, made them fit what he wanted, and on with the show.

We got our budgets approved, started working the plan. And then this manager comes back saying that this is just not approved, even though we had a meeting with *HIM* a month earlier, so I get his boss, and a few others, and talk through things and get a blessing for this approach. Again.

And on Monday, my own manager, voice thick with his own frustration, told me this support manager was having fits again, and so his boss, who is our boss, had asked for a full architecture review. “And could you put together a few slides?”

A few slides? Sure. About what? About the fact that we made a decision months ago and have invested time, money and people on the basis of that decision already approved? About the fact that the support manager wants us to change nothing because “Things could change later” even though that risk is already built into my design?

Fine. I’ll put together a presentation. The original title “[Project] System Architecture.” The original subtitle: “Letting dead horses lie.” Except I still don’t know what issue I’m supposed to address. Or why I’m doing this. Or who the allegedly interested parties are. And in the end, instead of doing a big detailed technical thing, I did just a row of boxes. And then, when people finally deigned to show up, 15 minutes late for this meeting that they insisted we have, I presented.

Talked for about 20 minutes straight. Told them exactly what I was doing, and exactly why I was doing it that way. Even told them that there isn’t a single reason that this project has to do the weird thing I’m doing. It’s not for the benefit of this project at all, which is probably why they had so much trouble with it.

But they listened. They didn’t interrupt me, which is the first time that’s happened in a presentation to these people. They asked me questions for almost another hour. And maybe I just explained it right, maybe they were in the mood to pay attention, I don’t know, but they got it. They actually suddenly saw what I’d done. And I could see their attention go inward as they started digesting all the implications.

So here. I can’t explain what my job is, but here’s what I did. I just reengineered the back-office for the entire Canadian portion of a Fortune 500 company. Without telling anybody. No dancing for approvals, no turf wars over authority and ownership. I just solved a problem they have, better. And I showed them why solving the problem this way is cheaper, faster, more profitable, and solves not only the problems of this project, but the problems for the next couple of things that they haven’t even gotten around to telling me are problems yet.

The details will shift, as we get to the work of actually making the changes I’ve proposed. In the weeks that have passed, the changes are already being seen. I’m sure they’ve lost the awe that showed when the lights went on in their head. And given another month, it’ll all be their idea.

But “their” idea still came from me, and it’s still alive, a tyrannosaur egg in the chicken coop. The rest is just technological Darwinism.

This was a triumph
I’m making a note here:
HUGE SUCCESS
It’s hard to overstate
my satisfaction.
Aperture Science:
We do what we must
because we can.
For the good of all of us,
except the ones who are dead.
     — Jonathan Coulton

.
.
.

Look at me still talking
When there’s science to do.
When I look out there,
it makes me GLaD I’m not you.
I’ve experiments to run.
There is research to be done.
On the people who are
still alive.
     — Jonathan Coulton