The Doing Nothing Contract, or How Not to Run Large Projects

 Soon after I left DEC, in 1995, I got involved in what would have been the biggest Systems Integration (SI) project they had ever done. This is the story of the project.

I joined DEC when I left university, 20 years earlier. It was a fantastic place for an engineer to work, and I enjoyed nearly every day I worked there. But in 1995 it was obviously going downhill - it was acquired first by Compaq in 1999, and then by HP - and I found a way to make a decent exit. While I was looking for another job, I started a consultancy business which turned out to keep me busy for the next four years.

About a year later I ran into a former colleague on a plane. He told me about a project that they were working on for a major European telco. It was going to be huge. Did I know anyone who might be able to help? Well, yes, there was me. I think he knew that and was just being polite. I did point out that my daily rate was over double what DEC would normally pay. This wasn't a problem, he said, because they wanted to assemble an elite team of top-level architects to get the overall design right. Within a week I had a purchase order for three months of my time, 40 hours per week, at my usual high daily rate.

The following Monday I showed up at the DEC office in Reading, England. There were two other people in the "elite" team. One was Dave, who I knew quite well - like me, he had already spent 20 years as an employee.

The project was very interesting, on an oft-repeated theme. Telephone networks have always been built using proprietary systems built by specialized suppliers like (then) GEC and Alcatel, costing at least ten times more than normal contemporary computers. The client had figured out that this was just a big distributed computing application, and wanted to run their national telephone and data network using off the shelf computer hardware and, as far as possible, software.

It seems like a wonderful idea, but it has been tried several times and so far has never really worked (which I guess is a spoiler for this article). The problem is that, even now and certainly 25 years ago, these telcos were used to being almost their suppliers' only customer. They could make incoherent or outrageous demands, confident that their suppliers would have to follow. The price tag reflected this, but the people making the demands - the engineers - weren't the people paying the bills, so those dots never got joined up inside these huge bureaucracies. A typical interaction would go:

Supplier:   the project will use database X and transaction software Y
Telco:       that's no good, we need features P, Q and R that X and Y don't have
Supplier:  we could add those, but it's bespoke engineering and will add (lots) to the cost
Telco:       no, we want off-the-shelf software, we don't want to pay for custom development
Supplier:  X and Y is what's on the shelf, you want something else, you have to pay for it
Telco:       (utter incomprehension)

In its latest iteration, this has led to the ETSI NFV (Network Function Virtualization) project, which in its 8 years of existence, so far, has yet to deliver an actual functioning network.

Anyway... our mission was to use off the shelf DEC computers and software to build the switching control system at the heart of the network. It isn't really a hard problem. The basis of it is extremely simple: take a number that someone has dialled (this was a while ago) and translate it into a series of simple instructions to the physical switches, like "connect channel 92 of trunk 147 to channel 128 of trunk 256".

The only thing that makes it hard is the scale - this has to work for millions of users and concurrent calls. But even then, none of these actions have to be closely synchronised. It isn't like, say, Facebook. where something you upload needs to become instantly visible to a billion users around the world.

Within a week, Dave and I had figured out how to put the available software components together and have a working, scalable prototype within a couple of months. Turning that into a production system would be a much bigger job, needing integration to the telco's dozens of management systems, but that was all low risk, routine stuff. We started writing code.

What we had completely failed to take into account, working in our cosy little office, was the DEC bureaucracy. In a much larger open-plan office nearby was an already-large team of project managers, program managers, project documentation specialists, and for all we knew telephone sanitizers as well. They operated in blissful ignorance of any actual technical details, as they came up with the cost estimates that would be at the heart of the formal bid for the project.

DEC has always been thought of as a computer manufacturer, but they had a large and thriving SI business as well. Over the years they had built up a series of procedures and processes for managing these projects. They were mostly pretty small - integrate a driver for a new piece of hardware into an operating system, or build a user interface around a database application. But some were big - tens of person-years - and a few were really big, like our telco project.

So part of the process was to know when the project was too big for the current level of project management. When that happened, the project would get escalated to the next tier of project management. They would bring in their own team to look at the design, the business aspects, the risk, and everything else.

The first thing the new team would do is to multiply all the existing work estimates by two or more, just as a matter of principle because that is nearly always right. (A very successful SI company CEO who I knew years ago always multiplied all engineering estimates by pi. He claimed it worked every time). Then they would add a whole new layer of program managers, project documentation specialists, telephone sanitizers and all the rest. Then they would start looking at the details, invariably resulting in another factor of two or so.

Our project had already been through two such escalations. Realistically this was probably a 50 person-year project, but the estimates were already in the hundreds, maybe 20 times the original figure. As a result it triggered yet another escalation, to the ultimate level, the corporate Large Projects Office (LPO) in Geneva. 

The LPO was to SI what J K Rowling's Dementors were to Hogwarts. Their job was to suck all joy, and possibility of success, out of a project. I have no idea whether they actually delivered any Large Projects, but I doubt it. Within a week they had doubled all the existing estimates and added yet another layer of program management and the rest. The project had now reached a size - approaching 1000 person-years, 10 times any realistic estimate - that just flat-out terrified the country management. A project on this scale, if it went wrong - which was just about guaranteed - could take the whole company down, and certainly result in some very senior people needing to seek new career opportunities.

The whole team was called together in a large meeting room. DEC had decided to no-bid the project. Permanent employees would be reassigned as soon as possible, while all contractors were terminated immediately.

This is where things got surreal for Dave and myself. We went to some project management type and pointed out that there was no provision for termination in the purchase orders we had received. DEC had bought 90 days of my time, and 180 days of Dave's, just as if they had bought a thousand cases of beer.

"That," said the project management type, "is covered by our standard terms and conditions. It is implicit in the purchase order."

"Maybe," we replied, "but what isn't in the contract, isn't in the contract. The only contract we have is the PO. And the PO has no mention of any standard terms and conditions."

They quickly accepted that we had a point. "OK, but in that case you will have to accept to work on any other project for the duration of the contract."

That was fine by us. A week or so later, such a project cropped up. We started reading documents and figuring out what was needed. But a day later we were called into our original project manager's office.

"The new project is refusing to pay your rates. They are much higher than the normal DEC contract rate, and they won't pay. They say we have to pay because we agreed to the abnormal rate. But we're not willing to subsidize other projects. So you must stop work on the project immediately. And you are not to work on anything else either. You are forbidden to work on any project except the one you were originally hired for." And that had been cancelled, there was absolutely nothing to be done for it. So we were forbidden to do any work at all.

It was Dave who came up with the name "The Doing Nothing Contract". I was commuting from Nice at the time, flying to England on Monday and back on Friday. DEC insisted on me being at the office to do nothing - I was not permitted to do nothing from home. That was the beginning of the weirdest few weeks of my professional life. I'd found a hotel just outside town, an idiosyncratic converted farmhouse with low rates and enormous rooms furnished entirely from estate sales of dubious quality.

Dave (who did live fairly locally) and I would roll up to the office around 10, read the news and chat for a while, then around 11.30 go off to a pub for lunch. We'd be back by 2.30, spend another hour or two nattering (no web to surf back then), and go home. I still had plenty of friends from when I lived in Reading, so I never spent an evening on my own. I put on about five pounds during the brief period this lasted.

After a couple of weeks, I got another call from the project manager.

"Look, this is silly." I agreed. "How about if we pay off half the remaining contract, and call it quits?"

That was fine by me, I already had other work lined up and this was just free money. I left that afternoon and didn't return. Dave made the same suggestion, but his contract had a lot longer to run, so they said no.

We stayed in touch. A few days later, they called him in and told him they would simply terminate the contract "in breach", which is to say they would just stop paying him. Dave had been at DEC for years and knew exactly how things worked on the inside.

"But if you do that, I'll sue."

"Sure, yes, off the record, that's what we'd advise."

"And DEC never contests things like that, so you'll just settle, and end up paying the full amount, plus costs."

"That's true. But that will come out of a different budget, not ours."

Even they could see the silliness of all this, though. Soon afterwards they settled with him on the same basis as myself. He walked away with tens of thousands in unexpected cash, and went back to his day job doing IT projects for insurance companies. And that was the end of the Doing Nothing Contract.