B00AZRBLHO EBOK

by Kim, Gene

  Phoenix continues to operate on a plan written over three years ago. I try not to think about that too much.

  Our progress seemed to be improving exponentially. We’re planning and executing faster than ever, and the velocity gap between Unicorn and Phoenix keeps getting larger. The Phoenix teams are taking notice and starting to borrow practices left and right and getting results that we hadn’t thought possible.

  Unicorn momentum seems unstoppable and now has a life of its own. I doubt we could have made them stop and go back to the old way, even if we wanted to.

  * * *

  While I’m in the middle of a budgeting meeting, Wes calls. “We’ve got a big problem.”

  Stepping out of the room, I say, “What’s up?”

  “No one has been able to find Brent for the last two days. You have any idea where he is?” he asks.

  “No,” I reply. “Wait, what do you mean you can’t find him? Is he okay? You’ve tried his cell phone, right?”

  Wes doesn’t bother hiding his exasperation. “Of course I called his cell phone! I’ve been leaving voicemails for him hourly. Everyone is trying to find him. We’ve got work up the wazoo, and his team mates are starting to freak out that—holy crap, it’s Brent calling… Hang on…“

  I hear him pick up his desk phone, saying, “Where the hell have you been? Everyone is looking for you! No… No… Des Moines? What are you doing there? Nobody told me… A secret mission for Dick and Sarah? What the fuck—”

  I listen to him for a couple of moments with some amusement as Wes attempts to get to the bottom of the situation with Brent. Finally I hear him say, “Hang on a second. Let me find out what Bill wants to do…” as he picks up his cell phone again.

  “Okay, you must have heard some of that, right?” he says to me.

  “Tell him I’m calling him right now.”

  After I hang up, I dial up Brent, wondering what Sarah has done now.

  “Hi, Bill,” I hear him say.

  “Mind telling me what’s going on and why you’re in Des Moines?” I ask politely.

  “Nobody from Dick’s office told you?” he asks. When I don’t say anything, he continues, “Dick and the finance team rushed me out the door yesterday morning to be a part of a task force to create a plan to split up the company. Apparently, this is a top priority project, and they need to figure out what the implications to all the IT systems are.”

  “And why did Dick put you on the team?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he replies. “Trust me, I don’t want to be here. I hate airplanes. They should have one of their business analysts doing this, but maybe it’s because I know the most about how the major systems connect to one another, where they all reside, all the services they depend on… By the way, I can tell you right now that splitting up the company will be a complete nightmare.”

  I remember when I led the acquisition integration team when we acquired the large retailer. That was a huge project. Splitting the company up may be even more difficult.

  If this is going to impact every one of the hundreds of applications we support, Brent is probably right. It will take years.

  IT is everywhere, so it’s not like cutting off a limb. It’s more like splitting up the nervous system of the company.

  Remembering that Dick and Sarah yanked one of my key resources away from me without even asking, I say slowly and deliberately, “Brent, listen carefully: Your most important priority is to find out what your Unicorn teammates need and get it to them. Miss your flight if you have to. I’ll make some phone calls, but there’s a good chance that my assistant Ellen will book you a return flight home tonight. Do you understand?”

  “You want me to deliberately miss my flight,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “What will I tell Dick and Sarah?” he asks, uncertainly.

  I think for a moment. “Tell them I need you on an emergency call, and that you’ll catch up with them.”

  “Okay…” he says. “What’s going on here?”

  “It’s simple, Brent,” I explain. “Unicorn is the one last hope we have of hitting our quarterly number. One more blown quarter, and the board will surely split the company apart, and you’ll be able to help the task force then. But if we hit our numbers, we have a shot at keeping the company together. That’s why Unicorn is our absolute highest priority. Steve was very clear on this.”

  Brent says dubiously, “Okay. Just tell me where to go, and I’ll be there. I’ll leave you to argue with the mucky-mucks.” He is clearly annoyed by the mixed signals being sent to him.

  But not nearly as annoyed as I am.

  I call Steve’s assistant Stacy and tell her I’m on my way.

  * * *

  As I make my trek to Building 2 to find Steve, I call Wes.

  “You did what?” he chortles. “Just great. You’re now in the middle of a political battle with Steve on one side and Dick and Sarah on the other. And, quite frankly, I’m not sure you chose the winning side.”

  After a moment, he says, “You really think Steve is going to back us up on this one?”

  I suppress a sigh. “I sure hope so. If we don’t get Brent back full-time, Unicorn is sunk. And that probably means that we’ll get a new CEO, get outsourced, and also figure out how to split up the company. That sound like a fun job to you?”

  I hang up and walk into Steve’s office. He smiles wanly and says, “Good morning. Stacy says you have some bad news for me.”

  As I tell him what I learned during my phone call with Brent, I’m surprised to see his face turn scarlet. I would have thought he knew about all of this, given that he’s the CEO.

  Obviously not.

  After a moment, he finally says, “The board assured me that they wouldn’t go further down the company breakup path until we see how this quarter turns out. I suppose they ran out of patience.”

  He continues, “So tell me what the impact is to Unicorn if Brent gets reassigned.”

  “I’ve talked with Chris, Wes, and Patty,” I reply. “Project Unicorn would be completely sunk. I’m a skeptical guy by nature, but I really think Unicorn is going to work. With Thanksgiving only two weeks away, Brent owns a significant portion of getting the capabilities we need built. And by the way, many of the breakthroughs we’re making are starting to be copied by the Phoenix team, which is fantastic.”

  To underscore my point, I say with finality, “Without Brent, we will not be able to hit any of the sales and profit goals that we’ve tied to Unicorn. No chance.”

  Pursing his lips, Steve asks, “And what happens if you backfill Brent with your next best guy?”

  I relay to Steve what Wes told me, which mirrored my own thinking. “Brent is very unique. Unicorn needs someone who has the respect of the developers, has enough deep experience with almost every sort of IT infrastructure we have, and can describe what the developers need to build so that we can actually manage and operate in production. Those skills are rare, and we don’t have anyone else that can rotate into this special role right now.”

  “And what if you assign your next best person to Dick’s task force?” he asks.

  “I’d guess that the breakup planning won’t be as accurate but could still get completed just fine,” I reply.

  Steve leans back in his chair, saying nothing.

  Finally he says, “Get Brent back here. I’ll handle the rest.”

  Chapter 33

  • Tuesday , November 11

  By the next day, Brent is back on Unicorn, and one of the level 3 engineers has joined Dick’s team somewhere in the snowy Midwest. Within hours, I get copied on an e-mail from Sarah:

  From: Sarah Moulton

  To: Bob Strauss

  Cc: Dick Landry, Steve Masters, Bill Palmer

  Date: November 11, 7:24 AM

  Subject: Someone is undermining Project Talon

  Bob, I’ve di
scovered that Bill Palmer, the acting VP of IT Operations, stole the critical resource for Project Talon.

  Bill, I’m deeply concerned with your recent actions. Please explain to us why you ordered Brent to return home? This is absolutely intolerable. The board has instructed us to explore strategic options.

  I demand that Brent rejoin the Talon team as soon as possible. Please confirm you understand this message.

  Sarah

  Genuinely alarmed that I’m being called out on an e-mail to the company chairman, I call Steve, who is obviously furious at Sarah’s apparent change in loyalties. After swearing under his breath, he assures me that he’ll handle this and that I am to continue as planned.

  At the daily Unicorn stand-up meeting, William doesn’t look happy. “The good news is that as of last night, we’ve generated our first customer promotion report and it appears to be working correctly. But the code is running fifty times slower than we expected. One of the clustering algorithms isn’t parallelizing like we thought it would, so the prediction runs are already taking more than twenty-four hours, even for our small customer data set test.”

  Grumbles and groans go around the room.

  One of the developers says, “Can’t we just use brute force? Just throw more hardware at the problem. With enough compute servers, we can bring the run times down.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Wes says, with exasperation. “We only budgeted for twenty of the fastest servers we could find. You’d need over a thousand servers to get the run times down to where we need. That’s over $1 million in unbudgeted capital!”

  I purse my lips. Wes is right. Phoenix is way over budget as it is, and we’re talking about a large enough amount of money that it’ll be impossible to get this approved, especially given our financial condition.

  “We don’t need any new hardware,” the developer replies. “We’ve invested all this effort to create compute images that we can deploy. Why not send them out to the cloud? We could spin up hundreds or thousands of compute instances as we need them, tear them down when we’re done, and just pay for the compute time we use.”

  Wes looks at Brent, who says, “It’s possible. We’re already using virtualization for most of our environments. It shouldn’t be very difficult to convert them so that they run on a cloud computing provider.”

  After a moment, he adds, “You know, that would be fun. I’ve always wanted to try something like this.”

  Brent’s excitement is contagious.

  We start assigning tasks to investigate its feasibility. Brent teams up with the developer who had suggested the idea to do a quick prototype, to see whether it is even possible.

  Maggie, who has taken such an interest in Unicorn that she’s routinely attending the daily stand-ups, volunteers to look into pricing and will call her peers in the industry to see if any of them have done this before and to get any recommended vendors.

  One of John’s security engineers interrupts, “Sending our customer data to the cloud may have some risks like accidental disclosure of private data or someone unauthorized hacking into those compute servers.”

  “Good thinking,” I say. “Can you list your top risks we should be thinking about, and prepare a list of potential countermeasures and controls?”

  He smiles in response, happy to be asked. One of the developers volunteers to work with him.

  By the end of the meeting, I’m surprised at the unanticipated payoffs of automating our deployment process. The developers can more quickly scale the application, and potentially few changes would be required from us.

  Despite this, I’m extremely dubious of all this cloud computing hullabaloo. People treat it as if it’s some sort of magical elixir that instantaneously reduces costs. In my mind, it’s just another form of outsourcing.

  But if it solves a problem we’re having, I’m willing to give it a try. I remind Wes to keep an open mind, as well.

  * * *

  A week later, once again, it’s demo time. We’re all standing in the Unicorn team area. It’s the end of the sprint, and the Development lead is eager to show off what the team has accomplished.

  “I can hardly believe how much we got done,” he starts off. “Because of all the deployment automation, getting compute instances running in the cloud wasn’t as hard as we thought. In fact, it’s working so well that we’re considering turning all the in-house Unicorn production systems into test systems and using the cloud for all our production systems.

  “We start the recommendations reporting run every evening and spin up hundreds of compute instances until we’re done, and then we turn them off. We’ve been doing this for the past four days, and it’s working well—really well.”

  Brent has a wide smile on this face, as does the rest of the team.

  Next up is usually the product manager, but this time Maggie is presenting instead. She’s obviously taking more than just casual interest in this project.

  She pulls up a PowerPoint slide on the projector. “These are the Unicorn promotions generated for my customer account. As you can see, it’s looked at my buying history and is letting me know that snow tires and batteries are fifteen percent off. I actually went to our website and purchased both, because I need them. The company just made money, because those are all items that we have excess inventory and high profit margins.”

  I smile. Now that’s brilliant.

  “And, here are the Unicorn promotions for Wes,” she continues, going to the next slide, with a smile. “Looks like you got a discount on racing brake pads and fuel additives. That of any interest to you?”

  Wes smiles. “Not bad!”

  Maggie explains that all these offers are already in the Phoenix system, and it was just waiting for the promotion functionality to finally get them to the customers.

  She continues, “Here’s my proposal: I’d like to do an e-mail campaign to one percent of our customers, to see what happens. Thanksgiving is in one week. If we could do a couple of trials and everything goes well, we’d go full blast on Black Friday, which is the busiest shopping day of the year.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” I say. “Wes, is there any reason why we shouldn’t do this?”

  Wes shakes his head. “From an Ops perspective, I can’t think of any. All the hard work has already been done. If Chris, William, and Marketing have confidence that the code is working, I say go for it.”

  Everyone agrees. There are some issues that come up, but Maggie says her team is willing to work all night to make it happen.

  I smile inwardly. For once, it won’t be just us staying up all night because something went really wrong. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. People are staying up all night because everything was going right.

  * * *

  The following Monday, it’s barely above freezing as I’m driving to work, but the sun is shining brightly. It looks like it’s going to be a great week for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Throughout the weekend, I’m a bit startled to see commercials with Santa Claus in them.

  When I get to my office, I throw my heavy coat over my chair. I turn when I hear Patty walk into my office and see that she has a broad smile on her face. “Did you hear the amazing news from Marketing?”

  When I shake my head, she merely says, “Read the e-mail that Maggie just sent out.”

  I flip open my laptop and read:

  From: Maggie Lee

  To: Chris Allers, Bill Palmer

  Cc: Steve Masters, Wes Davis, Sarah Moulton

  Date: November 24, 7:47 AM

  Subject: First Unicorn promotion campaign: UNBELIEVABLE!

  The Marketing team burned the midnight oil over the weekend and we were able to do a test campaign to one percent of our customers.

  The results were STELLAR! Over twenty percent of the respondents went to our website, and over six percent purchased. These are incredibly high conversion rates—probably
over 5× higher than any campaign we’ve done before.

  We recommend doing a Unicorn promotion to all our customers on Thanksgiving Day. I’m working to get a dashboard up so everyone can see real-time results of the Unicorn campaigns.

  Also, remember that all the items being promoted are high margin items, so the effects on our bottom line will be excellent.

  PS: Bill, based on the results, we expect a huge surge in web traffic. Can we make sure the website won’t fall over?

  Great work, all!

  Maggie

  “I love it,” I say to Patty. “Work with Wes to figure out what we need to do to handle the surge in traffic. We’ve only got three days to get this done, so we don’t have much time. We don’t want to screw this up and turn prospective customers into haters.”

  She nods and is about to respond when her phone vibrates. An instant later, my phone vibrates, too. She quickly looks down and says, “The dragon lady strikes again.”

  “I wish I had an ‘unsubscribe’ button for her e-mails,” Patty says as she walks out.

  A half hour later, Steve sent out a congratulatory note to the entire Unicorn team, which everyone loved reading. More surprisingly, he also sent out a public reply to Sarah, demanding that she stop “stirring the pot and making trouble” and to “see me at your earliest convenience.”

  That still didn’t stop all the public e-mails going back and forth among Sarah, Steve, and Bob. Seeing Sarah toadying up to our new chairman, Bob, was awkward and uncomfortable. It’s like Sarah didn’t even care how obvious she was being and all the bridges she was burning.

  I walk into a meeting room to meet John about the resolution of all the SOX-404 and Unicorn security issues. He’s wearing a pin-striped Oxford shirt and a vest, complete with cufflinks. He looks like he just came out of a Vanity Fair photo shoot, and I guess he’s continuing to shave his head daily.