Helpless

Amidst all the sound preparation, due diligence and forecasting - times nowadays are as cunning as a thief in a moonless night!

Often times coming seemingly out of nowhere, and exploiting you when you're at your most vulnerable.

You cannot help but feel the sheer incompetence when these things catch you off-guard. Its a feeling that I know a lot of folks would never want to experience again; not with the current economy anyway.

I was brought-in in my new organization in the midst of the merger activities from its latest major acquisition last year.

Throughout the year, I've been responsible at orchestrating mainly, merger related efforts and initiatives, and if I can say so my self, have been doing a relatively good job with it.

Until I came across this one project, which, is not really related with the merger program line-up, but is somehow intertwined. I say "somehow" not for lack of understanding, but because even at this point, the project's sponsors can't even tell me this much at this time.

So began what I thought was a routine run of implementing a 3rd partly integration of the latest logistics and administrative solution offering that the firm is just dying to get their hands-on. Little did I know that the project, not unlike it's name, is totally "out-of-track" and is just an accident waiting to happen.

I'm not sure how the problem began; perhaps it has something to do with the vendor not having proper documentation such as performance characteristics, whitepaper, logical/business diagram, or the fact that the vendor themselves doesn't seem to understand the internal workings of their product, but even at the very beginning, I know that the project is destined for rough waters.

The problem took little time to escalate to a technologists worst nightmare. Obviously, I could've done things a little differently now that I knew more what the outcome would be, but the fact that it feels like the firm is taking what is supposed to be something that would only take a single response (like performance characteristics or the application's heat maps...) is not a good tell-tale sign that things is just bound to be in chaos.

Very soon, I felt that the project needed to re-direct its efforts to drive out the gaps, which was supposed to be filled-out by the vendor in the first place. It's not an easy task trying to figure out something that the entire firm, save from a handful of folks from the vendor knows something about.

Clearly, my concern is that, with the end-of-year evaluation looming at the horizon - the dilemma of this one project whose gone berserk will overshadow my other works and would give a negative impression with the PMO in general.

As mentioned before, I was not the type who would re-tell whatever success I have with my other endeavors. I'm the type of person who'll not sound a beep at something, unless I'm having problems that require upper management's action.

I know this is a poor example of a person whose main line of work is to effectively manage impressions, but that just the way I was when I started with the firm.

Now, I'm struggling to set the record straight. And the fact that the firms 2010 book-of-work line up shows less than a quarter from 2009 troubles me a lot. This means that the firm might be looking at letting people go, because 2010 work demand is comparably smaller than during the merger year.

I'm concerned that with this one project, my future with this firm hangs on a "very thin thread".

Indeed, its a sad fact, being helpless. I know that I might be exaggerating with my worries, but you can't help but wonder "what-if scenarios" especially with my circumstances.

Sigh, I just wish this week is over (I'm expecting my quarterly evaluation meeting with the firms top guys by end of the week), cause worrying this much is an exhausting thing to do.