devRant - A fun community for developers to connect over code, tech & life as a programmer

Almost a decade ago (damn I'm getting old) I was working on a virtually dead project - i.e. it was the third, and final, iteration of a very failed project in a huge company with literally millions of Euros poured into it.

I came in as a junior SysAdmin/CM to substitute someone who was happily fucking off to another, better job. And alongside me a senior started as well to deal with the management/interaction between vendors and internal "teams" (6 peeps to deal with infrastructure requests from vendors - DBA, SysAdmin, Networking, Hardware commissioning, that sort of stuff).

Now, nothing against this senior - really cool dude - but he was objectively doing a poor management job. Partially due to some personal issues and a little bit of incompetence/disinterest.

So me, and the rest of these peeps that the vendors interacted with, were getting massacred with impossible requests/deadlines and blamed for almost everything wrong with this project.

Two weeks after we started, SeniorMan had to take a week off due to some personal issues so I was asked by higher management to take over his tasks as well until he's back.

The next day, I took all the peeps to get coffee and told them that from now on, regardless of what anyone tells them, unless it's from our direct manager (who pretty much didn't give a shit) every information/decision/deadlines negotiations goes through me and me alone. And they're not allowed to even consider anyone asking them for favours without talking to me first.

Now, this also came with the understanding that I would become the sole person to blame in case of fuck ups, and I gladly accepted because I would have quit anyway if things didn't change.

So everyone agreed.

And oh boy did we put the heat on those fucking vendors, because those two weeks that SeniorMan was busy drinking coffee with the upper management, I studied the entire project - I was familiar with every single network switch, VM, application and most importantly, all the agreements between vendors on which applications they would deliver and when.

They guys from my team also followed through with ignoring vendor requests that didn't come through me. They would literally hang up on them. CCed me on every single email. It was great.

A week later, we learned that SeniorMan would be gone another week, so upper management gave me a company phone because things were going well. SeniorMan would later quit because he pretty much wasn't needed by the time he came back.

With the phone and the blessings of the management I was pretty much the only entry point for vendors to deliver their applications. And I was strict as fuck. My negotiation policy was to multiply everything the peeps from my team told me by 3. If they didn't like it, well tough luck, give us more resources and wait 3 weeks to get them up to speed.

And within a month we became the highest performing team on that project. Outperforming the second best by as much as 6 to 1. All this with much less stress for everyone in the team.

Thanks to these changes, vendors actually had to do their job and deliver the promised services without blaming us. So we magically passed the first milestone, and suddenly went from failed project to the most promising project in the company.

Ah good times, good times...

Bonus story:
I participated in a meeting, before hitting the second milestone, where the project lead from one of the vendors was trying to pin their incompetence on us being slow to deliver infrastructure requirements.

So I pulled out the Visio file that everyone in the room agreed to a few months prior, and one by one showed that not only everything was delivered on time but even earlier on some items. And that due to them being slow on testing their shitty software on our infrastructure everything is going to shit.

The CTO of the company was present in this meeting, and what followed can only be described as someone who had no idea what was going on, being hit in the face with some else's balls of steel. This CTO proceeded to yell out how much all the vendor contracts cost and that if these fucks didn't get their shit together he'll release the lawyers from the dungeon of debt.