I 'lost' at work today

[Exterous]

I had two big projects get torpedoed in the last 10 minutes of my work day. One was a large-ish project slated to begin soon so it could be completed before fall student rush. We had all the planning worked out and just needed the client to sign the form. The Red Tape of Higher Ed intervened and we just learned after weeks and weeks of talking with the college IT'Purchasing' wants it to go out to bid - even though they came to us because we could give them quotes from multiple vendors* and had a quote from company for 20% more. It will almost certainly still come back to us but it'll cost the University more for a rush job and it won't be our best work as we try to shove it in place by the fall deadline which means it'll be a giant PITA for me. So basically a lose-lose situation for everyone involved

*For this job we would configure an infrastructure running a vendor of their choice although we certainly have recommendations.

3 minutes after that fiasco I learned another project might be cancelled due to an IT re-org where central IT services are now re-charged to local IT. The client was relying on "free" licensing which is not longer free meaning they no longer have the budget necessary for the project. None of the local IT people were made aware of the pending changes due to Central IT's fears people would suddenly sign up for a bunch of services and then be grandfathered in to the new rates. So instead they have a bunch of half finished projects and plans that are no longer viable. I mean we'll still get paid due to our contract but it looks like the college we were working will will have to abandon a partially finished project. Oh well - just raise tuition a bit more to offset the costs of bad planning right?

 

[Carson Dyle]

Raise tuition due to hiring overpaid consultants, you mean.

 

[Humpy]

We had all the planning worked out and just needed the client to sign the form. The Red Tape of Higher Ed intervened and we just learned after weeks and weeks of talking with the college IT 'Purchasing' wants it to go out to bid...

All the planning was worked out except how and who was actually going to pay you for the work?

Sounds like IT needed to check the purchasing limits much earlier in the discussion. Working with College/University purchasing departments can suck for sure, usually IT is worse though.

 

[Exterous]

Raise tuition due to hiring overpaid consultants, you mean.

*shrug* we're less than hiring people to do it internally

All the planning was worked out except how and who was actually going to pay you for the work?

Sounds like IT needed to check the purchasing limits much earlier in the discussion. Working with College/University purchasing departments can suck for sure, usually IT is worse though.

The CFO of the college said yes. The University Purchasing dept. said "No."

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

Whats your position? Unless you're a project manager who gives a fuck if 2 projects fail? Your salary remains the same, just with less work.

Or since you mentioned "the client" I'm guessing you're the outside firm? That said, you win some, you lose some. Just hope you don't get fired for not having the dollars under your name

 

[Exterous]

We work in flexible teams so it depends on the job but usually a mix of PM, sales, implementation and support. Sure my salary is the same but the work will be worse and we'll have to do more support when the first job gets reassigned to us and the users won't be as happy with the results because its rushed. As for the other a lot of the big schools (and many smaller schools) have never really struggled for money so they are wasteful spending it. We had a recent project where a new GenFund CapEx project was denied because the school was being 'fiscally responsible'. Instead IT was forced to go with an GenFund Operational Expense cloud service thats at least 20% more expensive over 5 years. And they don't think things through when they spend the money. A different school spent $90k on touch screen room schedule displays for a non-classroom building yet still hasn't secured them properly so they keep getting SIP calls from Africa. (Why Crestron has SIP enabled on a room schedule display is beyond me. You can't actually answer the call which is too bad because that would have been entertaining). And tuition keeps going up. Was having touch screen displays to tell you who has the conference rooms scheduled worth 2 kids being in debt for 30 years? Or the last project I mentioned. Some kid is going to into debt to pay for hardware that is now going to sit unused in their datacenter (Maybe Dell will let them return it, I'm not sure). I walked through a new business school building and there are 60-70" TVs everywhere. Every room has at least 1 and some of the classrooms have as many as 8. And they are on all the time. Just walking down the hall you'll see screen saver after screen saver running with no one in the rooms. So now you have added electrical and heating costs to the crazy amount that had been spent on TVs.

I like my job as I get to play with some expensive stuff for some unique applications and enjoy providing good solutions that meet needs for a reasonable price. The downside is that I get to see a lot of people who have lost sight of who is paying for their job and bad decisions.