Quote:
Originally Posted by BMWGUYinCO
My story/contribution to this thread....
I've mentioned before I work* for the nations largest non-profit healthcare system as a V.P. of Infrastructure.
The senior IT level leadership above me is terrible, in fact we outright fired the CIO 2 months ago after a disastrous tenure (Fun fact: she's now been fired at her last 5 jobs!).
But in any case, my charter was to modernize their Infrastructure within 5 years. I was promised a budget of over $155M each year (total 5 year budget of $775M). I got less than $65M this year, of which 60% is spent on contracted labor. I also ran into particularly long lead times for HW delivery, especially for network gear.
I documented the risk to project success and brought it to the attention of senior leadership, saying there is no way we can be successful. I had mitigation strategies, such as ordering 2 years of HW in advance, sourcing through 3rd party independent resellers, etc. I was told I couldn't do any of those things, but that I HAD to keep the modernization effort on track and schedule. One SVP said to me "Get creative". To that, I responded: "You want me to find a factory full of elves and see if they can build this HW faster than the OEM manufacturer? Otherwise, I don't have a magic wand. You cut my budget by nearly a third and because of that we're falling further behind on eliminating our technical debt, and now I can't get hardware for almost a year in some scenarios. Telling me to get creative demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of current challenges."
As you can imagine, my response wasn't well received.
*End of this story - I resigned. I've never been a quitter due to challenges, but the leadership is so poor I realized that I stood no chance of success. Another fun (but sad) fact: since I left 3 weeks ago, 3 of the SVPs were laid off with their entire organizations being eliminated, with more wider RIFs coming. And its sad because this RIF will now involve staff - good, hard working people who are paying for the mistakes of their leaders. Many of these failures are due to the supply chain issues, but the majority is because of idiot leaders. Boils my blood...
/endofrant
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Management at your former company seems to have gone to the same school of management "leadership" at a former employer of mine went. I sell into the Federal government and during the Federal sequestration a few years ago, spending dropped through the floor. Agencies were not spending on any new projects and were only spending enough to keep the lights on. I also think this was when we had the Federal shut downs too. Management was beating all of us up for not meeting our sales targets. When we told them no one was spending, the answer we got was that isn't an excuse and to be more creative. I was thinking how the hell do you want us to pull money out of these agencies? It's as if these idiots lived under a rock and didn't see the news stories.