The Office

At the Office we have 4 ongoing NPI (New Product Introduction) projects.

• FNP1 is a mandatory upgrade to a previously released product.
  
• FNP2 is a software release originally scheduled to release a few months after FNP1 and highly dependent on deliverables from another division of the company (FOD).
• FNP3 is a new product based on FNP1 and FNP2 with a few other features integrated from FOD.
• FNP4 is based on FNP1 and FNP2 with a few other features integrated from yet another division of the company (YAFD).

In the original project plans (FOPP) the FNP2 team was to deliver a scaled down version of FNP2 (FNP2A) to FNP1 in time for FNP1 release.

However, it is now getting close to the target release of FNP1 but FNP2A is not yet available because FOD is not delivering on commitments.

FNP1 release by target date is critical because current product (FCP1) that FNP1 is replacing includes obsolete and literally unavailable components (oops....management forgot to account for that when designing FCP1.

FNP1 project team and FNP2 project team have different Project Managers (FPM) and different Functional Leads (FFL); however, all of the employees who do the actual work are on all of the teams and must go to all of the team meetings. The FPMs and FFM only attend the meetings for their specific project and could care less about the state of the other projects.

Oh, and did I mention that the FPMs are all relatively new to the company and industry while all of us workers understand the products and how they interact....

So in every project team meeting (so 8 x per week - one cross functional team meeting and one engineering team meeting for each project) we (workers) are expected to provide status in a format deemed acceptable by the FPM including risks and issues and how they affect our deliverables and impact the project target release date.

All I can say is that either I forgot to take my meds last night or I need a stronger prescription, because I explicitly told two of FPM teams today that they were our biggest risk...while most of the rest of the workers were in agreement, they took their meds last night and were able to keep their opinions to themselves (except for the wide-ass grin on their faces)....

Thanks for your support....