The Setup
Heading back to The PM Dude, because the Dude needs to rant.
The Dude works at a large company, but his “business unit” is pretty small ($200M revenue compared to about $50B for the larger enterprise).
Our leader is the VP/GM of our business unit, and she’s been our leader for about 4 years.
Her background is 25 years at the company, in many sales leadership roles, but she came to us first as part of an internal merger with another group. But she has a longer history with the half that was merge with us, and that history includes the leader of our current engineering team.
This leader, let’s call him “Watson”, runs our direct engineering team. They build our platform (we do training and certifications for tech industries) for delivery of our public facing assets. But they also build a lot of our internal tools.
In fact, we have a myriad of bespoke, internal developed platforms. A sales platform, a platform to provide services to our agents, platforms for internal analytics, and a really clunky home-brewed content presentation platform for our delivery of training to end users.
It is this part, this home grown platform was at one time innovative, a way to seamlessly integrate hands on labs with the training material.
But that leads to a lot of pain.
The rest of the market though has caught up, and vastly surpassed our capabilities. The fact that we can’t display SCORM formatted training elements is a huge issue.
Virtually 100% of the COTS solutions for content presentation handle this easily.
Our team tells us it is a) not worth the effort, and b) if we force them to implement it, well, it would take 12 – 18 months.
The Dude just ain’t buying it.
More details
Our BU has about 650 employees, and fully 300 of them report through this Engineering director. Watson has a HUGE team, especially since his engineers do not work on our main product (aka the training that we sell), but just the peripheral products.
Watson also deprioritizes projects that don’t align with his preferences.
We had a plan to migrate our learning management system from an outside vendor, an off the shelf solution that counts virtually all the major corporations use for their internal and external training. A system that is extremely flexible, it is cloud based, it is secure, and it is very feature rich.
It has capabilities that we dream about.
But Watson has taken it upon himself to kill the migration. To nuke the project. His reasoning was flimsy, it was due to cost.
Of course, it costs us to use the platform, but our home grown solution isn’t free either. It is built and hosted in AWS, so that ain’t free in the Dude’s mind.
But the real cost in the homegrown solution is not the hosting charges, or the AWS compute charges. No, it is the 75 engineers we pay to maintain this feature deficient platform.
Now, the Dude ain’t in HR, but he knows that our direct FTE engineers are about $225K/year fully burdened. We do have a lot of contractors. They are less overhead, and we don’t pay benefits or them, but they don’t really save that much money. So, let’s say they are about $180K a year (between the head-shop that manages them, and the end salary, that is pretty close)
Thus, let’s say that our annual spend to keep this creaking bastardized platform alive is about $15M. And, that is without the hosting charges from AWS.
In the wildest use case for the COTS platform would cost us about $4.2M
And we really wouldn’t be able to eliminate or repurpose all of those engineers. But we probably would need no more than 7 people to build and maintain the services to tie it all together from the commercial API’s.
In short, our engineering leader’s hubris is costing us about eleven million a year.
But Dude, why is this leadership incoherence?
Glad you asked. Our VP/GM is a savvy cookie and operator. She has strong business sense. But she is somewhat flummoxed by the technology. Not that she’s incapable, but she is susceptible to flattery and pretty butterflies.
And our Engineering lead has strong ties to her and a history.
So, she listens too much to him, and that loyalty has allowed her to be hoodwinked.
If you get her separate, and make the case for the migration, she gets it.
But then Watson gets in her ear, and the logical migration is put on hold. Even after she was convinced, the business justification accepted by the leadership team, the decision made.
And then Watson just overturned it.
And our VP/GM seems to be OK with her pet engineering leader being an asshole and protecting his turf.
The Dude just learned that they added 4 new heads to the team that supports and develops our home-grown platform that is shit. $800K a year more for an inferior solution that cripples my team’s ability to build engaging content.
The real problem
There are two cliques in our group. One who thinks that the platform, the presentation layer, is our product and value proposition, and the other that realize that our customers are there for the training (aka the “content”), and who view the platform as merely a means to an end.
Our VP/GM knows what our business is, and where the value and our P&L comes from.
But her loyalty to Watson is destroying our business.
This is why the Dude drinks.
