This is where the Project Manager comes in. John McCrusty is the Senior Project Manager at Our Company. John McCrusty was born in Scotland about 130 years ago. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Physics way back when individual transistors were the size of cell phones and computers filled a room. Lately, his physics skills have been getting kind of stale, however, and nobody was interested in hiring him to do physics anymore. Young kids with Master’s degrees were the newest company saviour. Old guys without Master’s degrees were the latest thing in redundancy.
But John was a resilient old fart and so he kept re-inventing himself in order to keep paying the mortgage and sending his kids on school trips to exotic places like Bali and Nepal. He tried Requirements Management Analysis but nobody knew what that was and stopped talking to him at parties. He tried Quality Assurance but everybody hated him and stopped inviting him to parties. Finally, after being laid off half a dozen times and trying almost as many careers, John finally found his true calling – Project Management. Here at last was a career that rewarded age and experience rather than vilifying it as sign of out-dated skills and outmoded ideas. John McCrusty was back in the game.
The VP of Finance, knowing that the Project Manager was screwed from the get go, gave him a break on the budget by promising to absorb the materials cost as a write-down against inventory in the next fiscal year. The VP of Finance could do anything with an Income Statement. He was running out of creative accounting tricks, however, and the skeletons were starting to pile up in the closet. That IPO had better come soon.
The Project Manager prepared a Project Plan as per company procedures. Mandatory sections in the Project Plan, as per the company template, included a Gantt chart, a Pert chart, a person-loading plan, a detailed cost breakdown, a Quality Assurance Plan, and a Risk Management Plan. The Project Manager had long since written a generic Quality Assurance and Risk Management Plan that could be applicable to anything from a granola bar to a nuclear submarine (next book). He just did a global replace of “product” with “garden shed” and these sections were complete. Sometime he forgot to click the ‘Replace All’ button but nobody ever noticed. The Senior Management Team never read his Project Plans anyway, and were content to verify that Table of Contents looked complete in accordance with the template for a Project Plan as laid down in the company’s ISPO-2000 procedures. He approached Kathy Slackersby, an Administrative Assistant at Our Company, and asked her to format the document according to the company document style guide.
Kathy Slackersby
That was Kathy Slackersby, Administrative Assistant, and that, of course, was a Completely True Story. Back in the twentieth century, companies employed Secretaries. Secretaries typed up memos, filed documents, delivered the mail, took messages, and ran the fax machine – sometimes even cheerfully.
Today, with the ubiquitous use of AI assisted word processing software, employees prepare their own documents. E-mails have replaced memos, voice mail has replaced the message pad, and meetings are booked online. Offices are paperless, so there is nothing to file and faxes are used only for personal business. In short, all of the traditional secretarial job functions have been replaced by technology.
As a result of all this tumultuous change, Secretaries have been replaced by Administrative Assistants. Administrative Assistants don’t have to type, file, or answer the phone and are loath to do so if asked. If fact, the term “Administrative Assistant” sounds so high-falutin’ that Administrative Assistants are reluctant do anything at all. Doctors are up to their armpits in blood, puss, and poop all day saving lives. Ask an Administrative Assistant to bring you a cup of coffee and you’ll find yourself accused of sexual harassment.
Kathy is from a small town called Middlevale about an hour’s drive from Our Company. She is 24 years old and has worked at Our Company ever since she graduated from high school seven years ago. Single, she lives in a small apartment near a dog park where she regularly exercises her two hundred pound German Shepherd. She is interested in men but her giant dog has other ideas and quickly scares potential suitors away. Kathy’s chief skills are shirking work and ducking responsibility. As a result of her complete lack of visibility, her position at Our Company is secure even though no-one is quite sure what she does or who she works for.