For any "experts" involved in project management

[chasfm11]

TAM... you have brought it back... all of it... the pain... the agony.... I've tried to forget but.......

Signed

A former IT PM

[Diesel42]

PBratton said it best.

I have told very powerful people, "If you don't want the answer, don't ask the question."
Seems to change the focus of the meeting. LOL

I've been in that meeting a few times...

For some reason, I don't get invited anymore.

[VMI77]

What I see is a group of Brit managers who are fully qualified to be American "journalists" and Democratic voters. Oops...excuse the redundancy.

[VMI77]

12 years ago I had this same meeting in a foreign country which shall remain nameless . Sitting across the table from me were representatives from:
1. State owned company
2. Fortune 500 company (running the facility)
3. Fortune 500 company (that built the facility)
4. Government official (holding my passport)

They called me in (under false pretenses) and demanded that I fix a problem that didn't exist. After several weeks of insisting that there was no problem, I designed, built, and installed a piece of equipment (that did absolutely nothing) to fix the problem that didn't exist. I got my passport and returned home. I left the company not long after (wasn't interested in future such meetings), but I often wonder if the problem ever "returned" and exactly how someone would go about repairing the "device".

Did it have lots of flashing lights, dials, buttons, and meters?

[LAYGO]

As a software engineer/web developer, been there, done that. ;) Thanks for the laugh . . .

[jmra]

12 years ago I had this same meeting in a foreign country which shall remain nameless . Sitting across the table from me were representatives from:
1. State owned company
2. Fortune 500 company (running the facility)
3. Fortune 500 company (that built the facility)
4. Government official (holding my passport)

They called me in (under false pretenses) and demanded that I fix a problem that didn't exist. After several weeks of insisting that there was no problem, I designed, built, and installed a piece of equipment (that did absolutely nothing) to fix the problem that didn't exist. I got my passport and returned home. I left the company not long after (wasn't interested in future such meetings), but I often wonder if the problem ever "returned" and exactly how someone would go about repairing the "device".

Did it have lots of flashing lights, dials, buttons, and meters?

No, I couldn't find a Radio Shack. It did have coils, capacitors, resistors, steady lights and a voltmeter. I thought about including a switch but I didn't want them to turn it off to see if the problem returned. Basically as long the the equipment had power the light was on and the meter read the AC voltage. They believed it to be a miracle worker. I'm sure it is part of some poor fools routine to verify the light is on and the meter is reading the proper voltage.

[MojoTexas]

No, I couldn't find a Radio Shack. It did have coils, capacitors, resistors, steady lights and a voltmeter. I thought about including a switch but I didn't want them to turn it off to see if the problem returned. Basically as long the the equipment had power the light was on and the meter read the AC voltage. They believed it to be a miracle worker. I'm sure it is part of some poor fools routine to verify the light is on and the meter is reading the proper voltage.

That's awesome!

This is also related...from http://dilbert.com/fast/2014-02-02/:




Heh...
MojoTexas

[Syntyr]

12 years ago I had this same meeting in a foreign country which shall remain nameless . Sitting across the table from me were representatives from:
1. State owned company
2. Fortune 500 company (running the facility)
3. Fortune 500 company (that built the facility)
4. Government official (holding my passport)

They called me in (under false pretenses) and demanded that I fix a problem that didn't exist. After several weeks of insisting that there was no problem, I designed, built, and installed a piece of equipment (that did absolutely nothing) to fix the problem that didn't exist. I got my passport and returned home. I left the company not long after (wasn't interested in future such meetings), but I often wonder if the problem ever "returned" and exactly how someone would go about repairing the "device".

Ahhhh this reminds me of the time I was brought in to fix the migration of a payroll system for about 14k lives to a new vendor. The company and the new vendor had been puzzling over a piece of middleware that they couldn't figure out. That had spent 4 months trying to figure out what this software did. It was written and compiled by a previous DBA. It took data from one system and moved into a data warehouse then migrated it up to salesforce.

No source code, no documentation nobody new anything except they were told they had to run this app once per day after the DBA left. Before I spent too much time and effort I picked up a copy of the origin table and the destination table and popped them in to Ultra compare and within minutes realized the files were the same except the record id column was move from column number 1 in the source file to column number 2 in the destination file. Just to be sure I reversed out the app and there was code everywhere but none of it did anything. So I created an ODBC connection from the data warehouse to the payroll system and created DTS package to update the data every half hour.

Charged them 5000 bucks for the work. On the bill I had two line items. 1 create ODBC link and DTS package $500 and 2 remove useless application that did nothing $4500. They were mad! Eventually they realized that it was their previous DBA that had worked them over in an effort to keep his job and look important

[VMI77]

12 years ago I had this same meeting in a foreign country which shall remain nameless . Sitting across the table from me were representatives from:
1. State owned company
2. Fortune 500 company (running the facility)
3. Fortune 500 company (that built the facility)
4. Government official (holding my passport)

They called me in (under false pretenses) and demanded that I fix a problem that didn't exist. After several weeks of insisting that there was no problem, I designed, built, and installed a piece of equipment (that did absolutely nothing) to fix the problem that didn't exist. I got my passport and returned home. I left the company not long after (wasn't interested in future such meetings), but I often wonder if the problem ever "returned" and exactly how someone would go about repairing the "device".

Did it have lots of flashing lights, dials, buttons, and meters?

No, I couldn't find a Radio Shack. It did have coils, capacitors, resistors, steady lights and a voltmeter. I thought about including a switch but I didn't want them to turn it off to see if the problem returned. Basically as long the the equipment had power the light was on and the meter read the AC voltage. They believed it to be a miracle worker. I'm sure it is part of some poor fools routine to verify the light is on and the meter is reading the proper voltage.

The elegance of simplicity. Reminds me of the submarine crew that taped the flow meter needle of their O2 generator to read in the right range in order to pass an inspection. But in their case their solution was a little too simple.

[BigGuy]

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right. - Henry Ford

Nothing is impossible--to the guy who doesn't actually have to do it. - Probably one of Henry Fords employees.

[Dori]

Charged them 5000 bucks for the work. On the bill I had two line items. 1 create ODBC link and DTS package $500 and 2 remove useless application that did nothing $4500. They were mad! Eventually they realized that it was their previous DBA that had worked them over in an effort to keep his job and look important

There is an old story about a billion dollar plant that had mysteriously ground to a halt. All efforts to restart it had failed and an expert was brought in. After studying the problem for a few minutes he took a hammer and hit one of the valves. With a rumble, the plant came back to life. Incredulous glances were shared, grateful cries and high-fives were exchanged.

Later, the expert’s invoice arrived for $10,000. The outraged executive in charge thought the bill was ridiculous, so he asked for an itemized breakdown. The itemized bill said
Hitting valve with hammer $10
Knowing which valve to hit $9,990

[SQLGeek]

I recently moved from a technical role in industry to a sales engineer position with a software company and can sympathize with many of these stories. So even though I'm now in sales, don't hate me too much because I'm trying to do things the right way and keep our account managers in line.

[Excaliber]

I recently moved from a technical role in industry to a sales engineer position with a software company and can sympathize with many of these stories. So even though I'm now in sales, don't hate me too much because I'm trying to do things the right way and keep our account managers in line.

Don't let the sales guys pull you over to the dark side over time.

[BigGuy]

I don’t remember the specifics of this tale, but I do remember the relevant parts.
There was a factory that had a problem with a production line. Apparently a filler nozzle would occasionally fail to engage one of the plastic containers as it came down the line resulting in an empty bottle being shrink wrapped in a finish package. The company brought in an expert who studied the problem and decided that though there was no way to prevent the occasional bottle from failing to be filled, he could set up a detection system so that no empty bottles would be placed in the final package. He replaced the conveyor with an more expensive one that included a scale to weigh each bottle after it was filled. Then a custom software package would shut down the production line so that a worker could remove the empty bottle. The worker would then hit a button to restart the line. He also included a counter to keep track of how many times the line was shut down because of an empty bottle. The consultant’s fees and hardware upgrades ran close to a million dollars.
After a month the manager noticed that his report on miss fills was always 0. He went to check on the counter to see if he could find out what was wrong. He discovered that one of the line workers had gotten tired of having to constantly restart the line after the system detected an empty bottle. So he had set a $15.00 fan up right behind the filler nozzle to blow any empty bottles off the conveyor before it reached the scale.

[WildBill]

Good story BigGuy! I think that similar situations occur very frequently.