The Contract Programmer

There’s a guy here who is part of the SOX team and is trying his hardest to be a useful contractor.  He is always cooking up ways to prove that the SOX team adds value to the IT organization.  So the other day he comes up with a report that catalogs all the outstanding trouble tickets that are older than 6 months old.  The report goes to the head of IT here and he says, “How is it possible that there is a trouble ticket that is older than 6 months old.”  To his way of thinking, what could possibly be so problematic that it wouldn’t be fixed within 6 months? 

This kind of simple thinking is one facet of management consulting that makes me scratch my head.  The truth is that some problems are not immediately pressing but they still need to be fixed.  Say that you have a leak in one part of your roof and it needs to be fixed. So you put a pot under the leak and empty it out after it rains really hard.  OK, you know it’s a problem, but you don’t have the time and money to fix it right now.  Are you going to say, “Let’s pretend that the roof is not leaking and cross it off the to-do list?”