Rolling Snowballs Downhill – Chapter ONE

This is the first chapter of Rolling Snowballs Downhill, the partially written, but unlikely to be finished, sequel to my business novel, Rolling Rocks Downhill.

I mentioned it, in passing, to some friends on LinkedIn and they asked to see it.

I’m blushing now, as I realise how much better my writing is when an editor has done his or her magic.

This chapter is draft. It hasn’t seen an editor.

A gentle reminder:

  • This is written Steve Abernethy, the CIO / Head of Deliver at WyxFin.
  • Declan is the official union rep and the two have known each other for years.
  • Craig Lally is the yoda / mentor character who helped Steve figure out how to do Agile, even though Agile doesn’t exist in this fictional world.
  • FPP is the big project that most of Steve’s staff have been working on for ages.

Chapter ONE

‘My name is NOT Inigo Montoya.’

The barman raised his eyebrows, and smiled knowingly at my awkward use of the code word.

He nodded. ‘Declan is in the back’.

He pointed through the smoke towards the pub’s back room.

I thanked him, feeling awkward at my use of the code phrase, but not really knowing what else to say. I patted my back trouser pocket. – for maybe the 10th time that day – checking the ransom note was still there. It was. I made my way into the gloom.

Think of Scottish pubs and you tend to conjure up postcard images – stone buildings, chimneys, flower pots, that sort of thing, maybe with a bagpipper casually standing outside. The Ferret wasn’t like that. An old pub in the wrong part of town, it resembled a soviet era prison block, the windows barred to keep burglars out, or customers in – no one was sure. It’s possible a banjo played in the back ground – da da da DA dum – though I couldn’t hear it for the sound of cheap slot machines and piped 70s rock music.

I spotted Declan McGuiness in a distant corner, a pint, half-finished, in front of him. I caught his eye and mouthed “same again?” . He nodded so I ordered two pints of Guinness. The barman asked if I was with Declan then said he’d bring our drinks over . You don’t get that kind of service in your fancy pubs.

‘I’ve just this minute ordered us both pie and chips’, said Declan, as I sat down.

‘Thanks’.

A pint or two, a steak pie, a stack of soggy old-fashioned chips and pile of peas was our tradition. We didn’t eat the peas, though – the were the local attempt at a garnish, “like in posh pubs”. Declan said that the ferret had the best pie and chips in Watt’s Bridge, which meant the world as far as he was concerned.

I pulled the hostage note from my back pocket, unfolded then uncrumpled it, looked at then shook my head in mock disgust. Some cruel bastard – Declan, obviously – had taken poor Fippy the snake, FPP’s mascot, shoved his head in a photocopier, pressed the button, then whisked him away to an undisclosed destination. The poor wee fella’s little pink tongue – light grey in the photocopy – stuck out at an odd angle from his squashed head.

I laid the note on the table in front of Declan then threw the unopened (and unmarked) pack of cigarettes – the ransom – on top of it.

‘I thought you’d given those stinkin’ things up?’

He looked down at the paper, feigned ignorance and said, ‘Am I supposed to know something about that?’

‘The note – and your meeting invite – said to be here, now, or the snake gets it’, I said, matter-of-factly. ‘Are you saying that’s it’s just an odd coincidence to find you here, now.’

He said, ‘Hmmm …. ’ then palmed the cigarettes and put them in his own jacket. He reached under the table then passed a plastic bag under the table to me. ‘I’m glad you turned up. Your snake has no fingers – I wasn’t sure what I’d have to chop off and send you, if you hadn’t taken this seriously.’

I snorted. ‘I’m up to my eyeballs. I don’t have time for this crap.’

The smile dropped off his face leaving a frown and double chin in its place.

‘I know about the outsourcing deal Steve.’

‘Outsourcing deal? What are you talking about Dec?’.

‘You could have told me, Steve.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

He raised his eyebrows, as if to ask, Are you sure?

I nodded emphatically, ‘Honestly Declan. Unofficially and officially, I don’t know where you get your information but I know nothing about any outsourcing deal.’ I threw my hands out, palms up, as if doing a muted imitation of a French mime, and shrugged.

That said, I was worried. My mind took off on its own, imagining worse case scenarios, finding “facts” to back them up. Was this what Eleanor had been hiding from me – the stuff she couldn’t tell me? If Hal was in trouble then who better to blame than his “incompetent” IT department.

Declan studied my face for a moment. ‘You really don’t know anything do you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Shit’. He started tidying the wee dish of salt and pepper sachets which sat on the table in front of us. ‘Nor do I. I was fishing.’

He spilled the beans. One of his well-connected union colleagues, in another Wyxcomb divisions, had a friend whose wife worked in a big IT consulting company and that company had, apparently, been talking with Wyxcomb bigwigs about something. When Declan and his colleagues learned this they figured they’d each conduct fishing trips – like our lunch – to try and find out what was up. They naively assumed that the IT manager would be in the loop if his or her team was about to be outsourced.

‘That sounds like one of those urban myths – they always start with “a friend of a friend heared that … “’, I said.

‘Yeah. That’s what I said.’ But then he added further “facts” which backed up their thought processes. It was also well known – apparently – that the financial results from Wyx-Health’s outsourcing deal – the work Craig Lally had helped kick off – had gone down very well at the board level and, on top of that, Declan said, the group HR department had successfully outsourced their entire groups payroll to a 3rd party software system.

‘Yeah but, look, Wyx-Health’s situation was entirely different to ours.’ I told him about the conversation I’d had with Craig Lally and how Wyx-Health’s old system was on its last legs and how they’d only, so far, taken new customers onto the new outsourced system.

He sniffed. ‘Yeah, but we’re both old enough and ugly enough to know that details like those don’t matter’, he said. ‘You know how things snowball in this place. Wyx-Health’s outsourcing success is just a little lump of snow and the payroll system is it’s first turn. Who can blame anyone for giving the snowball another good shove, which sets it rolling downhill, letting it grow bigger and faster and bigger and faster, under it’s own momentum. That’s how snowballs start.’

The barman arrived, a tea towel over his shoulder, with our two pints, placed them on the table. Neither of us spoke until the barman had picked up Declan’s empty glass and was out of earshot.

Declan added, ‘Real snowballs kill people who get in their way. They pick them up, absorb them, then suffocate them. If the same happens here then I’ll tell you now, we will fight it tooth and nail.’

I shook my head. ‘None of us want that.’

‘So that was my first issue. Now for my second. We seriously need to talk about FPP’, he said. ‘You are treating my people like they’re second class citizens. I’ve had complaints and I can’t allow that to continue Steve.’

‘Second class citizens? What are you talking about? Apart from the first few weeks of FPP’s rescue, any overtime that your members – my staff, by the way – have worked, has been entirely voluntary; we’ve not asked anyone to cancel their holidays.’

‘Yeah’, he said, then he picked up his pint, studied it, admired it even. He waited a few moments until the bubbles had properly settled then took a sip, paused a moment, then sighed. ‘That’s not what I meant.’

He said, ‘It’s not the FPP people, Steve, who are complaining. It’s the rest of us – people like me who aren’t working on FPP – who are pissed off. We’ve all worked hard this year and, now that FPP is going to succeed, we just know that the bonuses and promotions are going to be unfairly skewed towards the folk who had the good luck to work on FPP.’

‘Okay.’ I hadn’t expected that.

I sipped of my beer, partly to buy time, mostly because it would have been horribly rude to sip Declan’s beer.

We sat there for a minute or so, neither speaking, until the barman emerged from the smoke carrying our pie and chips (and peas). He placed the plates down in front of us, warned us they were hot, then rushed away to get our knives and forks.

‘Look,’ I said, as I warmed up to give him the official response. ‘The HR process is set up to be fair and objective.’

‘Perhaps, but that’s not how it works in reality. The folk working on FPP have struck gold. But forget promotions, forget bonuses, forget all that formal HR stuff for now. FPP is a damned site happier than any project I’ve worked on since I started at Wyx-Fin. People are talking about it. Complaining about it.’

Neither of us spoke as we each quietly struggled to open the little plastic sachets of vinegar and ketchup then squeeze them onto our chips and pie, respectively. Declan politely waited while I sprinkled salt on my chips. I passed the shaker to him and watched as he plastered his chips and then pie with salt.

He looked at me and said, ‘What? You think a little salt is going to kill me?’

I shrugged.

He put the salt down, picked up his knife and fork, cut a bit of pie and ate it. I did the same. We both agreed, politely, that the pie was good.

I shook my head. ‘People are complaining about other people being happier?’

‘Yes, you ejit. That’s how people work. Those of us who are NOT working on FPP are not happy that the other folk – them that’re working on FPP – are getting happier coz they’re working on a successful project while out jobs get worse.’

‘Worse? What’s getting worse?’

‘But while you’re busy waving your FPP-is-corporate-priority-number-one stick, the rest of us are swimming in treacle. FPP has cherrypicked the resource the rest of us need to get our work done. We can’t get DBA’s to do our work; our bosses say that they can’t get any of your time; and we’ve no chance of getting any CORETRAN work requests approved.’

He cleared his throat. ‘You just watch your iNPS scores over the coming months.’

[iNPS is the internal net promoter score – a single number used across the company to measure how much staff would recommend working their.]

‘What do you mean?’

‘You watch. Gregor’s numbers will go up, but your other managers scores will start to go down. You watch.’

I said, ‘Maybe’ then I told him I could see where he was coming from but, well, you-know, priorities dictated …

‘Priorities, my arse. You need to start sprinkling magic FPP fairy dust on to everyone’s work.’

[Note: “arse”, if you’re not sure, is the correct way to spell “ass”.]

He took the cigarette pack I’d given him out of his jacket pocket, opened it then offered me one.

I shook my head. He knew I didn’t smoke. ‘I thought you’d given up?

‘I have. These aren’t so much a ransom as a dramatic prop.’

‘Oookay’.

‘When I gave up smoking I read books, bought patches and fake cigars. So far it’s stuck, although it’s possible I’m addicted to the fake cigars. The thing is, all the books tell you that a lot of people give up when they get bad news – a heart attack, a health scare, a loved one getting lung cancer, those sorts of thing.’

‘I know that.’

‘Me, I just got sick of the damned things. But, here’s my point. The books all tell you that if you give up smoking because of an emergency then you’re gonna struggle big time when the emergency goes away.

‘So’, he continued, ‘on behalf of my constituents I wanna know what you’re gonna do now that the pressure’s gone away from FPP. Are we going to revert back to the old ways – which none of us want – or are you going to spread the goodness around?’

‘The pressure hasn’t exactly gone from FPP.’

He waved dismissvely. ‘You’ll fix the messaging system problems. Eventually. What I want to know is this: when do we start inverting more projects?’

[Note: inverting is the name they use for prioritising software project features then delivering them incrementally – it’s named after the inverted pyramid model of writing newspaper articles.]

I looked down, thought a moment, could I trust him?

I’d known him a long time and while our goals sometimes differed I decided I could. ‘Can we speak off the record?’

‘I s’pose.’

‘I’m intend inverting more projects, but just now I’m planning my attack. There’s politics involved.’

‘Explain yourself.’

‘When FPP’s budget runs out at the end of March, I want to transition Gregor, Phil and Vrinda off FPP and on to other projects, with the intention of inverting them.’

He eyed me, suspiciously. ‘Which projects?’

‘Initially,’ I said, tentatively, ‘whatever projects are about to start, or are inside, their test phase. After that, we will start inverting projects much earlier than the test phase.’

‘Makes sense’, he said. ‘Why not start inverting projects now, while you’ve got momentum?’

‘I can’t risk FPP.’

He nodded, slowly. ‘Hmm. And the politics?’

I put down my fork, picked up my pint glass, then took a long sip. The pub door opened, throwing a refreshing breeze across the room. I watched two old timers come in, acknowledge the barman with a nod, then amble across the room and sit near one of the pub’s windows. A few moments later the barman arrived with an old wooden box, which one of the old men opened, tipped upside down and poured out a pile of dominos. I watched as both men slowly tidied the stack. Before they’d finished, the barman returned with a pot of tea and two cups. Moments after that he returned to them with two shot glasses.

‘This is still off the record?’

‘Yes.’

‘The politics is that I intend building on what we’ve done with FPP and I want to do that here in Watt’s Bridge. I want to set it up so our department is viewed as a role model across the entire group. If things go well we might even setup an internal consulting group where we train others from across the group, how to invert their projects.’

He roared with laughter. ‘Ha! You want to turn little old Watt’s Bridge into a hotbed of innovation!’.

‘Why not?’

His face went blank as he considered my question. ‘You do know that, across the group, they think we’re a bunch of ginger, back-counrty hicks – the poor cousins of the group?’

‘Of course I do’, I said. ‘But they’ll start listening when we start consistently delivering projects on time, or early, and when we start making more money than any ever imagined.’

‘Money?’

I ran him through FPPs numbers.

He let out a long whistle at the end. ‘I had no idea. Are those numbers on the record, or off?’

I leant back in my chair. ‘You can share them, if you like.’

That was, frankly, one of the reasons why I’d agreed to meet him. This part of our conversatoin might be off the record, but that didn’t mean that a few useful rumours wouldn’t magically start spreading about the office.

I said, ‘Sum up. What do you want from me Declan?’

‘You tell me.’

I paused, considered my words then said, ‘I need to start spreading the FPP magic fairy dust and get my own snowball of goodness rolling downhill. Is that it?’

‘That’ll do – though it sounds twee when you say it. D’ya promise?’

‘Pardon?’

‘I would like you to promise your staff, via me, that you will do this.’

I nodded slowly. If I made this promise I would not make it lightly. ‘Will you help me? A change like this might look simple, but it won’t be easy. People will need to change how they work – a bit. You could help me smooth things over.’

‘I will.’

‘In that case, I promise I’ll do this – as soon as FPP is safe.’

We finished our meal. I called the cab company. We chatted about our families and stuff like that for a couple of minutes and then the cab driver, the same guy who dropped me there, stuck his head through the door. I picked up poor Fippy the snake, hoped that he hadn’t suffered any trauma and left.

I urgently needed to talk to Eleanor.

OOoOO

As soon as I was in the cab I pulled out my mobile to call Eleanor.

While I was out I’d missed a call from Australia. I checked my voice mail and Bruce, our messaging system’s vendor, had left a message saying they were 98% certain they had the problem isolated. There was some problem with our mainframe config. He said we’d almost certainly be able to download a new release of their software the following week. (our time) which they thought would almost certainly fix the problems we were experiencing. He said he’d call me over the weekend with an update.

I muttered “we’ll see” to myself then called Eleanor.

No answer.

So I texted her:

AM I BEING OUTSOURCED?

Yes, sure, I had dismissed Declan’s suggestion to his face, but that didn’t mean he was wrong.

Something definitely was afoot.

Three minutes later my phone dinged.

NO.

And then:

YOU HAVE TO TRUST ME.

Sure, but you’re not giving me a lot to work with, Eleanor.

I texted back:

I NEED TO KNOW MORE.

And then my mobile rang.

I let it ring a half dozen times before answering it.

It was Eleanor, of course.

She summonded me to her office.

Clarke “the bottleneck guy” Ching

Written by

Author: The Bottleneck Rules & Rolling Rocks Downhill.

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