Sometimes they die...

The line is from a TV series called ER: one doctor is talking to another who thought they could save every accident victim. This doctor has spent many hours and much angst on a patient who in the end he can't save. The older, wiser doctor says "well, sometimes they die." And so they do.

I was on a project once that was for some high-up sponsor (can't remember their job title exactly, but I'm sure it had "infallible" in there somewhere!) called Hal - this is not their real name, but the name of the super-computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey who is so super it tries to sabotage the whole mission. Hal did not have enough work to do so compensated by micro-managing everything and thereby looked busy but allowed enough time for Hal's hobby of putting their staff under immense pressure. Hal was a small-time bully.

Hal - of course - was not only supreme manager of everything (or whatever the title was), Hal also thought Hal was an expert project manager and business analyst. When I started work on the project Hal gave me objectives but no time - Hal said that Hal was NOT going to work with business analysts as Hal was far too busy for that. Not only that, but Hal did not want me to do analysis at all: Hal just wanted me to document some rules in isolation. So I did the work and then Hal kicked me out on the grounds that the project wasn't achieving what Hal wanted (Hal's real objectives - it turned out - were about a quick and dirty solution that would end up generating another project to fix the mess in a year, or perhaps 2, but failure was to built in in the form of non-compliance with legislation. Job creation was definitely part of Hal's real objectives).

The lesson I took from this is that sometimes projects do die - the project analysis I was kicked off was already over 1 year late when I started. I suspect this lateness was because of the conflict between what Hal should want to help the organisation succeed and what Hal really wanted to help Hal stay in a job - and Hal needed time to find a way of getting what Hal really wanted. If I had been allowed to work as a business analyst then maybe it could have been turned around but Hal had other objectives that meant turning it around would be a failure for Hal so - sometimes - projects die, taking some workers with them!

Post mortems seldom cure the victim, but what they can do is inform our work on the next project. This one was a great learning experience for me in humility: you can have all the fancy-pants analysis tools and mind-sets in the world but sometimes the project will die anyway. Live and learn...