Workplace Politics harming the project

Back in September, I alluded to the impact that politics was having on project Condor. That impact reached a peak yesterday.

The Parent Company (TPC) have spent the last few weeks gathering requirements. It has, truth be told, been quite successful. Representatives from the outsourcing company in India have shown themselves to be slightly ignorant of how our business operates, but their knowledge of Use Cases has been encouraging and really helpful.

The problem is that this requirements gathering exercise has focused purely on what Condor's front-end application will do. No attention has been paid to the back-end core systems. They have assumed that everything below the web services interface layer is within my scope.... but it isn't. I have been given - on more than one occasion - a strictly limited scope and instruction not to 'get mugged' by taking on additional work. Politics. I have twice been told that we do not want to take the blame when something goes wrong. Aaaaarrrrrgh!!!

When I expressed my concerns over the gap in scope, no-one took any notice. Until yesterday.

My boss and I were talking about this scope gap, when he wondered aloud who our Business Unit thought was paying for this stuff - them or TPC. So I phoned the lovely K and asked.

She replied that they were paying for all the changes necessary for the product to work. Heartened, I explained about my enforced limitations, and my concerns that significant areas of requirements had not been included in anyone's scope nor budget. She thanked me and immediately got on the phone to G, my boss's boss. Later that afternoon, he came upstairs to talk to me and my boss about the situation. It didn't take long to convince him that it was 'reasonable' to expect us to do that work, since the outsourcing company were not going to do it, and it was our system, after all.

The upshot of it all is that I now have most of what I wanted in the first place. It would have been nice to manage the entire project, but I will still be responsible for providing the core functionality required for launch.

Although the project is still highly commercially sensitive - hence my use of the Condor code-name (not the real one) - once it is launched to the public, I will be able to reveal my involvement. I can now enjoy my weekend, and look forward to my final 5 hectic days at work before the holiday break.