I got tasked with a project that for some reason strikes me as just plain fun. It's the kind of work that you take home with you, that gets in your head in your idle moments. Much to my good fortune, I started blue-skying about the project's potential, and got told that not only could we fill out the Happy-Path wishlist, the work had already been half-done in an earlier attempt to get the project done.
Pinch me.
Then the other shoe dropped: the reason this project stopped all that time ago was because the product would only have been used by four people. And now all of those people are gone, and the new guy is having to do their jobs.
I cringed at the idea that I might have to break the news to the client that they couldn't have what they wanted. And said a brief prayer of thanks that I hadn't told him about the many amazingly cool things we could do with his project.
I went to my superiors, expecting them to say, "Sorry, we can't justify the cost for just one user," and shoot the project down. Instead they asked the question, "How important is this data?" They had me talk to somebody in a different area who had asked management for the data. I discovered that not only was he going to need the information we had, but he'd need it to be produced using the blue-sky goodies we'd shelved. And the people that he in turn was needing to pass the data to would provide Federal funding to see to it the job got done.
Suddenly, that one miserable person has the potential to get something that's not only going to make his job a whole lot better, it's going to give him some cool tools...and raise his importance to everyone else around him.
Pinch me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment