| I you think this is an 'IBM' only problem, you're in for a surprise. I've worked on very large projects with other very large service companies, and the experience is very much alike. From day one the client company gets swamped by an army of vendor analysts, the prime reason for this is to establish that it is the clients fault the project will fail as they couldn't respond to requests for information fast enough. Any information you manage to supply will be scrutinized for 'discovery' of 'change requests' to pad the meters and CYA. Meanwhile, a 'technical specialist' room chock full of developers is installed to (a) put on extra time pressure and (b) start the billing engine in top gear. When you went into that room there were literally people sitting at desks watching the vendor's equivalent of CS 101 video courses. Also, a team of lawyers is already preparing the documents for the 'settlement' in case of the (very likely) project failure. All status information to the project's steering committee gets 'green shifted' until the supplier is ready to shift to litigation mode and then overnight the project's near unrecoverable disaster gets revealed alongside a proposed 'rescue' plan that is priced so ridiculously it makes the 'settlement' look cheap. In the private sector these train-wrecks are often settled with non-publish clauses as making the press would make both parties look bad. In our case the supplier dropped a small percentage on the billing. The client was left with a room (literally) full of boxes of A4 'analysis' documents and 25M€ out of pocket. (this was in the financial industry, so it was basically pocket change) All involved, both supplier side and customer side seem to have not suffered career wise from this disaster, moving swiftly to new clients and new projects. P.S. Am I the only one that finds the author's sweeping generalizations of nationalities a bit in bad taste? |