Project Gold Medal

It's funny to think that there's an intiative at ePrize to 'reduce the suckiness'. I was just thinking back to the times when upper management would occasionally ask for suggestions via email. During one of those times I was lucky enough to snag a copy of everyone's emails. I went through with a fistful of highlighters, picking out common threads and putting them in the same color.

There was one overwhelming suggestion -- Project Teams. That is, grab one PM, one SE, one IE, and maybe even one QA (a common designer would be used) and utilize these cross-discipline folks for a pre-determined set of clients. There were variations on this theme -- breaking the PM group into smaller, bite sized pieces and assigning a team of Production workers to them so they'd always know who was assigned to their projects and bruilding a rapor not only between PMs and Production but also between PMs and their clients. There had been a precident set with the Engagement Managers and clients so why not carry that mindset throughout the production cycle.

Page after page I saw this. My yellow highlighter was just about dry by the time I made it through the sixty-odd pages of ePrizer constructive criticism and outright bitching.

The funny part? While discussing the employee feedback with my boss I remarked, "Wow, I sure saw a lot of people wanting Project Teams!"

His response: "Really? I hadn't noticed that." Unfortunately, he wasn't joking around.

When something like Project Gold Medal comes about, then, it makes me wonder what's making it through the haze. When 80% of the company says basically the same thing and the message neither gets through nor gets adopted, will something like Project Gold Medal -- a "project" with the goal of company improvement -- be effective at all?