More Vendor Madness – When will it end?
Today we had a meeting with a group of technical sales consultants from a Vendor for a very expensive package that we have purchased and I've been asked to integrate and get working. This meeting was about price feeds into this system, and how the current product's abilities are weak to say the least. They rely on Reuters exclusively, but with a Reuters infrastructure, you (the client of Reuters) can push data back into the RMDS feed, if you so choose. You just become another 'exchange' to Reuters. But that's not a realistic alternative for us.
What we need to do is to get at the Vendor's price feed service and inject prices from my CacheStation based on our rules. These prices are what's necessary - as opposed to what's possible from Reuters, and so I'm not really in favor of simply faking Reuters RMDS with our source - I want a new source that can co-exist with the Reuters feed and then we can configure the application to take certain prices from one feed and other prices from another. Sounds very reasonable.
What's amazing to me is that in this meeting we had close to a dozen people - of which two were really necessary - the lead Vendor representative and myself. Everyone else was at least redundant, and often (as it turned out), painfully in the way. I've worked with the feeds, I know what needs to be done, I understand the basics of the Vendor's price service, and all I need to do is to get them to do a few things to meet me half-way on this and we'll all be fine.
But as it turned out, people that had no idea what was needed or what was happening had to be in this meeting. Why? Politics. What a waste. This is something I hate - don't waste my time if you're going to have people unrelated to the issue blathering on about this or that... get to the point, or confess that you have no idea what is going on and get on with it.
In the end, you'll come back to me - or you won't. If you don't, then you got it figured out without me - Good for you! If you come back to me (as you have time and again), then it's because you have no clue about what to do, and you want me to Just do it.
And it seems this insanity - I can think of no better term for it, is going to continue before there is any hope that it will get better. Tomorrow we're having a meeting about the first hardware purchase to run a version that they've never deployed and don't even have finished. How can they possibly know? It's a guess, so let's guess and move on. Chances are, we're not going to underspend - this is a massive system and it's going to need more than we're throwing at the problem now. But they have to have these meetings with people that have no real clue about what they are doing. It's amazing.
Someday this will end... it'll end the day that they realize that this has to work, or it's a waste of millions of dollars. When that day comes, they have traditionally come to me and said 'Make it work!', and at that point, the meetings stop. Unfortunately, that's typically ridiculously close to the drop-dead date for implementing this thing, so I'm under a lot of pressure to get it working in a very short time.
But that's the day it'll end. I just wish I could sit all this out until that day. It's the kind of thing that gives me a headache - and reminds me why I don't sit in the manager/owner chair any more. It's just no fun.