Jockeying for Position
The bad thing about revolutions brought about by the death of The King is that there's a second battleground that has to be fought - the War of The Winners.
What I mean is best seen in an example: within the last week the higher ups at my workplace have decided that the existing infrastructure for moving data around is not going to cut it anymore. In fact, they haven't liked it for quite a while, but it had a guardian angel that has since left for greener pastures (at the point of a gun), and so the infrastructure he championed is also going out the door.
But what to replace it with?
There's the second war.
There are at least three camps now fighting it out for the technical vision of the replacement technology/system. One I'll call the Plan Big camp, the other No Plan, and the final Right Fit. I'm in the Right Fit camp, and believe that since we can't get the users to plan 3 months out, there's no reason to plan and build three months out as it's all too likely to change. Also, we don't have a pressing need for any new technology, we just need to execute better on the current technology.
The Plan Big camp is big into technologists leading the users. They believe that they know what we'll need 3-, 6-, 9-months down the road and want to create a grand plan that will enable everything to be done easier by investing 3, 6, or 9 months in heads-down development on new technologies so that we don't get left behind.
The No Plan is just as it sounds - make no plans further away than right now, maybe two days out, and assume that things will just work out. Interestingly enough, the commanders of the No Plan and Plan Big are both convinced that they are the smartest person they know and the other commander is a complete dolt.
So as the next few months pass it'll be interesting to see which, if any, of the camps really wins, and what happens as a result. Depending on who wins, there's certain to be a good bit of sabotage and glee in partial failure.
And I thought dealing with my kids was difficult at times...