Fail Your Way to the Top

One of the things at the Shitshow that literally makes me want to dry heave in the toilet until I am blue in the face is what I like to call "fail your way to the top". When I first started working at the Shitshow, I thought the key to moving up the Shitshow corporate ladder was to finish things ahead of schedule and below cost. Boy how I was wrong and this couldnt be any further from the truth. As it turns out, the key to success at the Shitshow is to go as far as you can over budget and schedule because when this happens, high level management becomes concerned and they alert all other types of management and your project gets put under the microscope.

When this happens, flunky managers of all shapes and sizes start coming to daily status meetings that they otherwise would never attend which gives people high level exposure. On top of that, they often take "corrective action measures" and "apply lean principles" to help a troubled project recover from its schedule and costs problem and this nonsense then becomes the new gold standard of process.

You see, when you finish something on time or schedule, management does not care and nobody will give you recognition or even know your name. They only care when things get so screwed up that a higher level manager is putting heat on them to fix the mess.

What is even more disturbing is that the same people who screwed up a program or project so bad in the first place, are now considered "experts" by the functional management since they helped to fix their huge mess even though they created it in the first place.

Because my on-time completion of projects goes unrecognized and the flunkies fail their way to the top, I throw rocks.