IMHO, short haul employment is pretty much 1-2 years. Within this period, the goal for success is in framing yourself for your next employer. With Dark Management principles deeply rooted, you need to succeed by all means possible, and time it such that you can leave the organization without too much collateral damage. Both to your reputation and the people that you interact with.
Sweep any unfinished tasks under the carpetSomeone else will inherit your problem anyway, so don’t fret.
Focus on the main goals, if your task is to deploy 10,000 users with SAP, then just focus on that. It does not matter that the users are screaming foul on the lack of training and change management. What you need to do is just concentrate on your key stakeholders as explained in “
Managing Up while Shitting Down”.
Because the majority of managers are dark by nature, most of the peons will not have access let alone gripe to the CEO. What’s more, middle management has been forced fed to dilute all reports when addressing up anyway. For example:-
Truth: 9 out of 10 users, do not know how to use SAP upon deployment.
Report: We are 1 month away to complete user training (preferably a date where you’ve already left the company)
Truth: There’s 5,000 incidents and growing on system bugs.
Report: There are 5,000 “requests” due to enthusiastic users working on the new systems.
Truth: The Version Control system lies under the table of one developer and the power supply get’s dislodged periodically by his restless feet.
Report: we have a top notch version control system with Disaster Recovery built in.
Truth: We have a Sharepoint 2000 environment with 90% of all enterprise applications and another Sharepoint 2007.
Report: we have a Sharepoint 2007 farm and it'll be real easy for us to migrate to Sharepoint 2010
Here’s the kicker; nobody wants to report bad news because somehow, Dark Managers label bad news bearer as “whiners” (see
Whiner Wanker), and your opponents won't be able to move the news upwards. True, your peers will bitch among themselves, but they won't have the gumption to do anything more than that.
Target one major project that allows you to work with a major Vendor.In this example, SAP; ensure that the SAP Project Director is well managed. A lot of Dark Managers make the mistake of squeezing the vendors because they want to divert blame to another party; leaving the vendors to hang on most project blunders. But for the short term- that’s a huge foobar!
Your goal is to pucker up and smooch your way up the SAP hierarchy and make one heck of an impression to their brass. If you've done it right, you will be hired once the project ends.
With a short term employment approach, you need to shift all blame to “God” or the “User”.
Vet through & Re-word Risk Management documents.To shift the blame to God, Risk Management documents have to be as vague as possible. Where the situation is something that cannot be mitigated unless management spends 3x more money compared to the project at hand. When the documents are endorsed by the Risk Committee, roughly verbalize the actual risks but never put it down in writing. That way, the Risk Management Community will be absolved of their duties when risks becomes issues. Everyone will exclaim ignorance but Governance would have captured that "due process" has been adhered to and no one needs to be blamed.
When magic hour happens, your risk document will be endorsed regardless.
Magic HourThis item deserves a blog entry of its own. So I’ll summarize it as the act of ignoring all risks and in order for the project to kick off ASAP. This happens when the board of directors or Chairman requests for a USD100mil system with 20,000 man days worth of effort, developed by Q4 and today’s the first working day after Q2. Typically the commitment will be agreed upon by the CEO because they're born and bred wankers... especially CEO's that works for organization that they do not form and own)
You get to be cruel to your peersPrincipally; through the act of back stabbing your peers via the Vendors to the CEO. You’ll gain even more brownie points when you slam your own peers for works that directly impact the status of the project in front of the vendor. This requires timing and orchestration of meetings.
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So, here’s the best part about the Short haul approach to Dark Management success. The vendors will actually value you as a consummate executor. It’s one of the most devious ways to climb up the corporate ladder. Use it when you're in a small organization where losers abound with no hope of moving out. It works well when there's a ton of Dark Managers working for the long haul (more on this later)
Unfortunately, once you’re at the top, it’s hard to maintain that position because you won’t have many supporters that you can depend on.
That’s where you need to employ Advanced Dark Management skills… another lesson, another day.
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