My experience is that large IT projects with any significant development component (as opposed to just installing shrink-wrapped software) suffer from having management imposed timelines that are unrealistic, based solely on when they want it completed or that they told the board of directors or shareholders it would be completed (i.e. backward scheduling) and not when it can realistically be completed (i.e. forward scheduling, with lots of slack for the unanticipated problems that will inevitably turn up in development).

Sigh… I don’t know which is more frustrating: the inability of IT to adequately communicate this to management at the outset of the project, or management’s inability to recall the previous missed (imposed) deadlines and the reasons for missing them (which should have been identified in the inevitable “post-mortem” finger-pointing analysis).

Glad to hear that the company you work for is more enlightened.

Ted:

Thanks for the good wishes regarding this opportunity; I’ll let you know how it goes.

The article you linked to was interesting; it seems particularly relevant to a recent experience — I was in fact contacted this week by a recruiter who’d found my résumé on Monster.ca and thought I’d be a good candidate for the position she was recruiting for (I believe Ted’s already heard off-line from K about my adventures with this one).

When she started describing the company and the position (without naming the company) I stopped her and said “Is this with *******? I already interviewed for that position about a month ago and didn’t get the job.” I had been referred to the company by another recruiter, and we had both felt that I was an ideal candidate for the position; evidently the second recruiter had reached the same conclusion independently.

Now, I had gone through a total of three interviews with the company: a phone interview (lasting close to an hour) with a woman from their HR dept, then a face-to-face interview with the manager of HR (lasting over an hour) and a second group interview (using the CIDS interviewing method I spoke of in an earlier post) with the manager of HR plus the company’s GM and a couple of senior managers from Ops and Sales & Marketing (lasting two hours).

I had felt the interview went well, and that I had presented myself as a good fit with both the company and the job. The HR manager even asked afterwards about my availability (they claimed to be anxious to get someone into this newly created position to sort out some internal issues ASAP; she had also enquired about my availability at the previous interview) and asked if I had any other potential offers on the go that might affect my availability. Sounded like they were heading towards making an offer, right?

Nope. Evidently they are still trying to fill the position, and the second recruiter told me from what she understood that very few of the many candidates that had been proposed had made it as far as I did. So perhaps they are suffering from problem No. 2 (Unrealistic Salary Ranges (as compared to talent sought) ) listed in Part 3 of the article you linked to. Maybe they need to add “Walks on water” to the job qualifications…

In any event, they seem to have some kind of dysfunctional hiring problem which may be reflective of other problems within the organization; perhaps it was for the best that I didn’t get the job.

There is a recruiters’ joke that HR stands for Hiring Resistance.

There was an interesting 3-part article by Frank Risalvato about a recruitment campaign that went very bad, and he tells why. You might find it interesting. Part 3 is here; it has links back to Parts 1 and 2.

http://tinyurl.com/2t4ttv

Unfortunately, it’s the only way I know how to say things; comes from that attention to detail thingy and my perfectionist engineer inner-self. OK, so maybe it’s my outer-self…

I was definitely impressed by the company — particularly their values, one of which was something to the effect of “make a positive contribution to society”. I’m all for making a positive contribution to the bottom line too, but there are too many companies and individuals for whom that’s where it ends.

Good citizenship, personal or corporate, seems to be, in many places, on the decline (replaced by rampant self-interest) so it’s refreshing to find an organization that seems prepared to walk the talk — my impression was that it wasn’t just “spin”, that they really are committed to their stated values.

I’m hoping that something positive does result from this — I believe I would be very happy working for this company.