Forecasting

Predicting the future doesn't seem very easy these days. Week before last, the weather forecaster predicted a dusting of snow for our area - we got 3". I was the carpool driver that day. The turnpike was ok, but the main highway I take to get to the turnpike was miserable. Lots of cars were sitting in the grassy median, rather topsy turvy as they slid off the road.

This week, I was also the carpool driver, on a day when they were predicting freezing rain and terrible conditions. I had chosen that day as I had a farewell luncheon to go to. Turns out the woman of honor didn't come in that day as her child was sick. Also turns out that the weather forecaster got it wrong again - just rain, not cold enough to freeze the road, although there was ice on the trees.

Took a vacation day Monday to finish (start) my Christmas shopping. Didn't pick a good day as I see meetings are being scheduled throughout the day to share the results of the latest reorg at work.

Also didn't predict the re-org end results very well. Was surprised to find that my boss, his boss, and the boss above him are all "impacted" by the re-org. By "impacted", I mean they no longer have jobs. The impact to me has also been surprising and perhaps, alarming. I have three new direct reports who I don't know and they are located over an hour from my home office. I lost a direct report and responsibility for that particular area. While I don't mourn that loss, it may impact the global project I was doing that I've become rather attached to - put a lot of time and effort into it, thought I was finally making some headway after some major setbacks and am reluctant to see it turned over to someone who is having difficulty completing two other global projects he is responsible for right now. I really wanted that project to succeed and will be sorry to lose control of it if that means it will not be implemented. Of course, that may just be my personal feelings of not wanting to let go of it.

My new boss is someone I already know and have worked with in the past. That is not the alarming part. The part that really concerns me is that they are breaking things into Demand and Supply. What that means for me is that Demand builds the IT applications or new functionality and hands it over to Supply to support. That may work well if Demand and Supply are tightly integrated, but the way it has been executed in the past is that Demand builds it and then throws it over the wall to Supply to fix it and keep it running. I don't want to be responsible for fixing someone else's issues or for maintaining a system to certain standards if the Build team is not also invested in those standards and levels of quality. As an FDA-regulated environment, they won't be the ones standing in front of the auditor answering the questions about how something was developed and implemented. I'll be the lucky one.

The environment I am inheriting is currently going through four main project releases. The project release was a relatively minor implementation - the Supply side had over 200 change controls submitted to fix the Demand team's incomplete or incorrect implementation in the first 8 weeks of the go-live period. Release 2 also had issues. Release 3 has been pushed back in timeline several months, but Release 4 is still "on schedule." But Release 3 and 4 will be extremely large implementations, definitely prone to difficulty in supporting them. Release 4 is officially designated as being out of design mode and already into build mode. But at the meeting I went to last week, the build team couldn't tell me how they were going to pass my company the data we get today nor could they tell me how they were going to build a data warehouse repository for the data we access today or even if they were going to do so. Yesterday, that build team insisted to our management that we had all the answers we needed to develop our own concurrent implementation team. I had to be the one raising my hand saying we didn't. The high-level PR spin for this Build project is that they are on-time, on-schedule and doing extremely well. The word on the ground is that they are struggling, throwing planned deliverables out of scope, pulling all the Release 4 resources back into Release 3, and that things are not being done correctly.

Before the re-org, in my company, I had both Demand and Supply responsibilities. In the future, I'll only have Supply and I'll have several companies to support in that area. If they execute well and we have a tightly integrated Demand/Supply, it could work. But for the five years that I have been here, we have proven execution is not necessarily where we exceed. We are known for our ability to succeed in a crisis. But crises have a way of burning you out when they become a way of life. I also want to be in a position where success is possible based on your own results and your own hard work.

Guess we'll see how it all shakes out. More news is coming out every day.