Selecting Projects - Big and Bad Ass

There’s a number of ways to padding up your resume as a Dark Manager. The easiest is from the projects that you've ran; and strategic selection of these projects is an art in itself.

By strategic; your goal is to wring the most amount of money from upper management or your customer before you would even accept it. For example, if it’s a Document Management System, your first task is to justify several million dollars worth of hardware include Information Lifecycle Management tools from EMC and Hierarchical Storage Management add-ons.

It’s all about injecting fear into the stakeholders, and projecting "what if" scenarios that culminates into the birth of the Anti-Christ.

Anyway, here are several things that I stay away from with a 10 feet pole.

Do something for free.
Free means you, absorbing all the risks and the customer as well as management gaining all the benefits. It’s true that you’ll gain brownie points but it creates precedence, and more work will come your way.

Ask the team to research for freeware or Linux, Apache PHP based applications
This directly translates to a resume that says USD5,000.00 on a project sheet when instead it could have been worth USD5mil. Remember, it’s all about image and pretence. It does not matter that all the money is on hardware but the fact is, you ran it.

Tai Chi away easy big value Projects
There’s nothing like a sweet multimillion dollar projects that’ll make you look good – on paper. It doesn’t matter whether it becomes a white elephant; the fact is, you ran it. I know it’s the opposite of what I’ve been saying about ‘Tai Chi’ing away projects, the trick is, to take on projects if you’re in it for the short run, but to move away from it you’re on for the long haul.

In summary, you'd want to take on easy projects that could have been done over the weekend, and blow it up into a 7 or 8 digit figure assignment - cool huh! :)