Dateline: 2000-2003. So el patron approved my funding request. Now what? Time to start spending. I told Dan, my handler at the IT value add reseller (VAR) I gots the cabbage. I assume he quietly fell out of his chair. Me? How the fuck did that happen? Anyhoots he came back to me with his formal proposal, for the fat stack as outlined earlier. Broadly consisted of 3 ingredients: hardware, software, people to code & manage stuff. Each of which would have varying degrees of clusterfuck in the months to follow.
This was the plan top level: one server running Business Objects (reporting) + one server running Informatica ETL (data pump). I'm not exactly a server guy, not going to install those in my cubicle, ergo they needed to be installed, and maintained, in the main IT server area at the company. By the 'real' tech guys. Try to calculate their level of thrill at that.
Oh and this. Dan was insistent he bring in several onsite worker bees. Because I had been approved for so much cabbage, apparently. He was keen to sponge that up. Back in the day, VARs had 'consultants' at the ready at inflated hourly rates, to do whatever their specialized software knowledge could do. I must have coordinated getting their badges to enter our locked buildings, also pc workstations & cubes. Don't recall doing any of that but I must have. Ergo 2 or 3 worker bees would show up and work on...what exactly? They weren't talking to me, ergo what was I doing? I know I chatted with them but what were they building? I must have told Dan after a week or 2: dude send them home.
But then: meet Mike. Dan was insisting we include an onsite project manager, an actual tech person. Someone who could supervise the server installs, coordinate...something. All for the sweet deal of $225 an hour. What a bargain.
Mike didn't dig me, openly. He was a middle age fat guy, zero personality, no real assignment other than show up and take my budget.
Oh but wait, there was one assignment he had. Supervise the installation of the 2 servers. Coordinate with the onsite tech team. Do fucking something useful. So, I was in Spain for 2 weeks, booked months earlier, bicycling around the Catalan region for a week with my 2 buddies. A few days in Barcelona & Malaga at the Strait of Gibraltar (Africa 9 miles away). Getting blitzed on Sangria every night & lost every day. Will write about that one day.
Whilst I was in Spain, the install sort of happened. Either my servers ran on Linux and the tech team didn't support that, or it was vice versa. Whatever. Total clusterfuck, and the $225 an hour I was paying Mike was, for what exactly? Anything? Hey Mike: how about scoping this out ahead of time. I should have fired him when I found out about this. I wonder how much I paid him (technically Dan's company). I came back from Spain, day 1 back, sat around a conference table with 6 others, sorting through the clusterfuck. Shoulda fired Mike, or at least asked what the fuck dude. This was my lack of leadership experience, plainly obvious to all. Or more to the point, getting grifted by a legit VAR who smelled money and soaked me.
Meanwhile: my colleagues. Recall, this was in the year 2000. Not the early days of the web but at this company? They remained years behind the technology wave curve. The entire company ran on Win 3.x until '97. Doesn't seem possible but true. My colleagues on the team were about 10 folks. Managed by a complete moron; a total fool with no sense of shame. The other managers played him for a puppet fool. Anyhoots. For some reason I felt the need to explain to my bronze age colleagues what I was doing: basically, webifying the department. So I talked to them in a separate room, explaining that we're going to move away from paper surveys & telephone interviews to migrate data collection & reporting online. They were baffled. No idea what I was talking about. Here's an actual reply from two separate groups: 'so how will this affect my bonus?'
I needed several hires to run my new team. Virtually all were mistakes. There was Robin, recommended by a fellow team lead with horrid judgement in a variety of areas. Example: he hired actual PhD's to create absurdly simple ppt decks with simple number crunching. PhDs! One of them had the cube next door, he quit within a few weeks. Anyhoots, Robin. Knew she didn't know a thing about the web; hired her anyhoots. She lasted a year mebbe than transferred to a general pm role to the larger team. Nice person though. Example: driving back from Chicago on 9/11 (I was in the air that morning) he had an explosive tantrum meltdown at me personally, entirely out of the blue.
There were also 3 internal transfers via other managers who wanted them off their teams: Rob, Jessica, Heidi. Jessica actually had her shit together. The other two? The wretched refuse I took on. Should have canned them both the 1st week. Rob had brain damage for real, judging from the scar on his skull. Felt sorry for him mebbe. Heidi was just a nasty person.
And then: the two contractors from India. Rupa & Nagu. One basically kept the entire team together. Until a catastrophic failure I'll dig into in the final p3 chapter. The other was brand new to her employer & lied about knowing Business Objects (she knew nothing about it) and reeked so badly of b.o. most of the team complained to me. I finally told my handler and she took it up with her. Wash your fucking clothes, and yourself. I'm paraphrasing. This was beyond a bad smell. It was a 10-foot radius of stench. Odd now how I didn't address it myself, but I was worried about the culture clash maybe. Not sure.
I got a call from a sales guy out east, saying 'hey do you know your individual auto dealer reports are showing the entire country's dealer network?' Rupa the contractor was learning this complex reporting on the fly, not checking anything, just creating live reports & then ignoring them. Nobody was checking fuckall, including apparently her resume credentials. Should have canned her the next day.
Actually, I made one good hire during my 3 years there. Just one. Brian, my technical project manager. He got my sense of humor. Not that he found it funny but at least he got it. We stayed connected for a few years after we both eventually departed. But he was good glue for those 3 years. Except he wasn't proofing anything, apparently. Maybe he was but there were way too many fuck ups going live in reporting portals that I got ripped apart for. This is why I hired a TPM, ergo minimal job expectations would be proofing shit before it went live. In hindsight, not really sure what the fuck he did all day, but we got along so I kept him.
Which led to him enabling the totally avoidable & worst shitshow in my entire career. Top 3 anyhoots. Coming up next.