Managers Everywhere is officially launching a series of short interviews with relevant industry actors for readers to understand how the brilliant minds behind everyday’s technology think and, more importantly, what sets them apart from the rest of us.
Note that identities have been intentionally kept anonymous to ensure interviewees an unrestricted channel to express their views without fear of retaliation.
Today, I am meeting Albert. Albert has more than 20 years of experience in technical complex projects involving tens, if not hundreds of stakeholders. He has participated in projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and today he’s had the courtesy of sharing his insights with me and with all our readers.
As a brief introduction, Albert is a self-made project staller. What project stallers are, we will soon get to know through his answers. Let’s roll.
I: Hi Albert, thanks for agreeing to take part in this interview. I know you are a busy person so I appreciate you taking the time and effort to talk with Managers Everywhere.
A: No problem, and thanks for having me. It is important to disseminate the offensively underrated practice of project stalling for everyone to see how important it is, so I appreciate the space.
I: What is project stalling exactly?
A: It’s a bit of an art. In layperson’s terms, it means surreptitiously delaying projects so they can take as long as possible. It means carefully finding the necessary gray areas and exploit them accordingly. Thanks to us, projects that could be completed in 3 months, will probably take 2 years. Projects intended to finish in a year, will most likely span a full decade. It’s highly nonlinear. Ideally, in a properly stalled project, time just stops, or goes really, really slow. It’s a service, now that I come to think of it. Every project has one of us, working undercover.
I: How do you stall a project exactly?
A: By bringing the minutiae to unnecessary high levels of attention, hopefully distracting everybody from the important things. C. Northcote Parkinson, one of the founding fathers of the practice, said almost 70 years ago that people within an organization give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. In short: everybody has attention problems, so we use that to our advantage. There are plenty of ways of stalling things. For instance, a decent project staller will discuss tooling forever: spreadsheets yes or no, PLM, CRM, ERP, SCM. A decent staller will suggest centralizing enterprise systems or to decentralize them in case already centralized, will bring ISO certifications on the table as crucial for success. And, of course, MBSE, which remains the best Pied Piper of Hamelin any project staller must have at hand to drive engineers in circles. Over auditability is another classic: bloated deliverables, reviews galore, a festival of JIRA tickets. Anything goes, really.
I: What project that you have stalled you still remember?
A: There was this one where the initial schedule was 1 year. Requirements were unusually clear and concise, staff was strangely competent. I felt I had to do something. So I teased the software engineers by suggesting that they were incapable of developing in-house a software component that, until that point, had been procured without any problems whatsoever. The engineers of course felt offended and said they could do it in 3 months. It’s been 15 years and there haven't been any releases yet. Recently, they rewrote it completely in Rust, whatever that is. Part of the team have already retired, some passed away of old age. Nobody can stop it now, as it’s crossed that invisible line where the amount of money and time invested is too big for anyone to dare to kill it. It’s perfect.
I: How would the world function without project stallers?
A: Honestly, I do not know. Some things are better off unknown. We are not ready as a society to meet deadlines. We are not ready to complete projects within scope and budget. Achievement blinds people and inflate egos. We must stay humble.
I: Do you standardize the project stalling practice worldwide?
A: There is an non-for-profit organization that has been in the making for the last 22 years. We haven’t still reached consensus about the template format for the statute draft. There is also a certification; if you pass the exam, you fail it, because as a candidate staller we want to see how you can cling to the niceties.
I: Last one; who hurt you?
A: Let’s say, I bring certain traumas with me that I channelize through my work. If I am not progressing with my life, then no one is.
I: Thank you.
