Hello My Fellow ISPI Colleagues,

Sorry for the lateness of this next newsletter and meeting announcement BUT my wife gave birth to our second son, Gabriel, and our schedules have been topsy-turvy ever since.

The meeting is still this Thursday October 23rd, 2008.

Plus the Golden Corral has changed their name to the Smokehouse Grill & Buffet but everything else is the same.

As I announced last meeting, we are looking for a President-Elect for the chapter.  Basically the President- Elect will learn about the organization and the chapter.  Then after several months, take over as president.

Just email me or tell me that you are interested.

This month we will have a bit of seasonal fun.

Our roundtable discussions will be about “Project Horror Stories”.  So bring your best horror stories about past projects that you were involved in and how they met their “bloody” end.  I know everyone has been in a situation where bad decisions, bad politics, bad negotiations or bad people ruled the outcome of the project.  The only recourses you had were to ride it out and not get decapitated or claw your way through to get to the end.  So if you survived (at least physically) what did you learn.

To get started, I will share my favorite…

It was a dark stormy night at a small software company where I worked as a senior programmer and a new government contract was being pushed our way.  The president and our financial officer began negotiations with the Air Force and came to an agreement.  Great…..so we thought.

As they told the team of the new work we started to realize that this was a HUGE project.  As I looked around the room I saw the faces of my 8-person team, they were excited but there was an air of concern.  So I asked the most pertinent questions…what is the time frame and how many people did we negotiate to do the work?

Well, let the bloodbath begin…

They told us not to worry because the project was only 6 months long (already I felt a stabbing pain in the pit of my stomach) and we’ll ramp up the team to 22 people.  As I raised my hand to ask the next obvious question, two of my team members started to choke on their Jolt Cola…

This would mean that every day that we did not hire anyone we would be falling 14 man-days behind (or a man-month every 2 days).  So I explain the quick calculation and asked…"How are we going to compensate for the time???"

They looked at me as if I was speaking Chinese and said – “Don’t worry about it.”

I’ll tell you the rest of the story and how I survived at the meeting.

See you at the meeting this coming Thursday!!!!!