This Is Nuts
Some people aren’t even aware they are in a race against time. We amble along, believing we have as much time to do whatever we’re doing as we need, but in some cases we don’t.
The Good Old Days
The types of projects I work with tend to rely upon clever people. Really clever, sometimes so clever no one else in the world can do what they do. That has always been cause for some anxiety. What if the ultra smart person we need gets hit by a proverbial bus?
People didn’t get hit by a bus terribly often, so we didn’t take that expression seriously. Companies would buy a key person insurance policy to satisfy shareholders or funding sources and blissfully forge ahead, assuming key people would be around for the entire project. They would usually not bother to try to get anyone else up to speed enough to step in if a key person fell by the wayside. Arranging for an understudy adds to costs, and how likely were they to need the understudy? Not likely.
Only a few lines of work seriously tried to arrange fallbacks for practically everything and treated key people as the most important to have a backup. Sometimes an understudy isn’t enough to safeguard against the loss of a brilliant person. Sometimes it takes a small team!
That’s a lot of hassle and extra cost. Small wonder that most projects and organizations routinely skipped doing it.
We also routinely set up contracts with only a little wriggle room in the schedule. We thought supply chains would only wobble once in a while, equipment could be repaired quickly if it broke, and so on.
Life has changed in the past 3+ years, to put it mildly.
How It Goes Now
Recently I went to absurd, hair-tearing lengths to obtain some material one of my project needs. It had been ordered by regular procurement from a routine source a couple of months earlier. Deadlines were upon us, it hadn’t arrived, nobody in Europe seemed to have any and we couldn’t even find out whether or when it might get here. Then things went wrong with the order I placed elsewhere myself to get a quick delivery. My order, an express courier shipment, was delayed almost two weeks due to a snag at Customs. (It’s a long story. It wasn’t Customs’ fault, or mine, or the shipper’s.) The original order eventually came, about 3 months late.
Equipment can be an issue, too. What we’ve got in one of my projects can’t quite do what we thought it could. If we buy a new unit that does exactly what we want, it won’t arrive until the end of the year. We can’t upgrade what we have in time, either. We came up with a solution. Like everything else, it took more time and effort than it seems like it should.
But supplies and equipment are just things. I get most anxious about people. At one point, both of the technical wizards most relied upon by one of my projects got COVID in different places at the same time. Then the person who would be our last-ditch backup for one of them got it too. Will everyone please stay healthy from now on? Not just because various projects need them, but because I like working with such smart, dedicated people and want to get to work with them again someday.
Sorry for going off topic. Bad things happening to good people is upsetting.
Anyway, for projects in these very interesting times, we need to get in the habit of putting more latitude in our schedules, more understudies in the staffing, more protection for people’s health and more redundancy in our projects in general.
Trying to work like it’s 2019 turns out to be nuts.