Condor to be outsourced.

A workshop was held yesterday, the purpose of which was to work out an action plan for the next 30 days. Why 30 days? Well, that takes us to virtually the end of the year.

The new programme manager for Condor, E, said that in order to have even the remotest chance of getting this project implemented by mid-year, we need to have some requirements and some high-level designs by the end of this year. And he's right! So what do we need to to do achieve that?

The group identified several separate work streams - Requirements, Design, Testing, Business Operating Model, etc. A team leader was appointed to each, and other people allocated to each work stream according to who the group felt was best suited to performing the tasks identified in each. It's a decent enough approach. For me the biggest disappointment of the day was seeing representatives from an outsourcing company in India present. It is obvious that E has already made the decision to outsource a large amount of the development work.

The end of the meeting was by far the most revealing.

On a flip chart, someone drew a mini Gantt chart showing, against the project timeline, the major activities and milestones that we would need to hit to make the plan work. The level of overlap between activities made it obvious that, either we were simply not going to do it, or we were letting ourselves in for the mother of all managerial nightmares.

E finished up the meeting by saying that while it appeared as if the plan was... um... challenging, he was not prepared to go back to his boss and say it was not do-able, until the various work streams generated the estimates to prove it. Smart cookie. E is no fool, and is obviously a very experienced and competent manager. He is surrounding himself with people he trusts and who he knows can do the job.