The Condor has landed.... almost.

The feasibility study has more or less concluded. I have spent the last five days with an almost constant headache, despite almost daily 400mg doses of Ibuprofen, frantically typing up all the notes we have taken or printed off the electronic white board (a wonderful invention when it works).

The report runs to 30 pages all told, with more to come.The message, however, is not good. The figure that the business were initially given as a 'thumb suck' guesstimate for the entire project will apparently be consumed almost entirely by the application development effort alone. The Capex costs are extra.

They were also expecting to have some 'tactical' (euphemism for quick-and-dirty) options available to them in the short-term, but we have little information in that area at the moment. The boys from The Parent Company have not been very forthcoming with their estimates of the actual capacity within the system. We do have some advice for changes within the application that will allow more volume to be processed, but TPC are probably not going to allow us to implement them anytime soon.

Frankly, I believe they just don't know how much spare capacity the system has. They are very good at monitoring various parameters and reacting when thresholds are breached, but we are contemplating more than doubling the current volumes within months (not decades) as a tactical move! And then multiplying that by a factor of 5 at least later next year. They are simply not prepared for something like this.

Yesterdays meeting with the Business was therefore, extremely interesting. The Director of Product Development and the Head of E-Commerce listened to the presentation, then started grilling Mr T from TPC about why he could not / would not supply any capacity estimates not costs for upgrading the system or anything.

His response was that the CEO had instructed them to wait while the TPC's new Exec sponsor made up his mind as to what his requirements were. We felt that that story is a little unlikely. Why would he say "Stop what you're doing on that feasibility study, and don't give them any estimates. Wait until we come up with our requirements and then do it all over again. The Subsidiary, who kicked this thing off in the first place can sit on the sidelines and wait until we're good and ready."? Does that make any sense? I didn't think so.

When asked if this was not just a misunderstanding on their part, Mr T had the bald-faced audacity to suggest that perhaps the misunderstanding was not on his part. It's unbelievable!

The meeting concluded with him being actioned to escalate the question, and get it clarified. Then Mr T left, and the rest of us sat around shaking our heads and laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all. We gave a hint that the development cost, excluding any infrastructure work on the part of TPC, was likely to be in the region of four million pounds, and the DPD didn't even blink. He knows that this project has the ability to make the company at least that inside the first six months of operation.

My hope is that it is all a horrible misunderstanding, and that we can persuade them to assist us with the infrastructure work and use our project as the first phase of their more ambitious effort. But that would be too much like common sense.