Chapter 4

It was time to get this install project started, so we headed up the main lobby to find out the details of where we were going to be working for the duration.

I was a bit surprised to find April, June, Blossom, Dawn, Annett, Claudia and Jill all there waiting in the lobby. They were all dressed up, but not for school. Calvin, Linda and Roberta were all checking them out.

“Hey you three, quit gawking at the boss’s daughters and nieces. I am sure they get their stunning looks from their mother’s side of the family,” I said loud enough for Paul to hear as he came up the hall to meet us.

Might as well get in a few jabs where I am able and not be completely obvious.

“I am sure my wife would whole heartedly agree with you there Joe,” Paul replied happily as he walked into the lobby. “We better get you and your team here to the conference room to start mapping out the project tasks before she arrives and decides to have the four of you carry their Christmas purchases around on the business’s dime. The project manager your company hired called this morning to say he would be here within the hour. My computer systems manager Kumar is on his way in now. He will be working directly with you on this project to get everything setup and configured here at our end. If you need me for anything, just tell Kumar or my secretary.”

Paul seems a bit too friendly all of the sudden. Is it because his daughters, and mine, are right here where they could report his behavior back to his family?

I knew where the conference room was already. I unpacked my laptop and got one of my newest pico projectors setup and synched to the modified rings. These had been upgraded to be programmed on the fly so that I could set them to control one or more of the pico projector rigs without needing to use a dock to code the rings to a single channel. I was telling the interns about the tech details of how it tracked movement and how that was turned into hooks to do various tasks when the project manager came in.

“Good day to you Mr. Joe Johnson. My name is Kumar Bagwala. I am to be project manager for this deployment,” Kumar said.

Right behind him, the Kumar from IT walked in to introduce himself.

This is going to be crazy as hell with both being named Kumar.

We were fortunate that the Kumar from IT was born and raised in the U.S. I could not find any hint of an Indian accent.

At least we have that going for us. Can he understand Kumar 2 any better than we can?

With us only working two and a half days this week, there was not much time to spare.

I assigned the interns to work with project Kumar while I got the rundown on the gear from IT Kumar.

When we went downstairs I found that the IT staff had their own floor and it was secured against the rank and file staff just wandering in to annoy them with whatever stupid problem they had at that exact moment. Half of the floor was setup for the data center floor, chillers, PDU and UPS gear. I was really impressed that they had a fully redundant UPS setup with a generator dedicated to each UPS and a spare generator in a true n+1 setup. The generators were sized so that one could take on the full load for both UPSs and data center HVAC needs. It was way past overkill.

“My thoughts exactly. Robert told me it was here and had everything installed in here to keep us from having to take any downtime. He saw what Sandy did to New York City and told me that as long as the building was standing we would not ever be down due to a power outage. We have enough diesel to run all three generators at full capacity for a week. Each UPS is only running at five percent of capacity. He has dedicated funds, which no one but me or my predecessor can access, to add generators and UPS whenever we hit twenty-five percent on any UPS. During our last runtime test, we ran the HVAC on UPS for two hours before we kicked in the generators to ensure it could handle the load and have enough juice to top off the UPS batteries,” IT Kumar told me. “Robert never told me much about his future vision for the company, but he had something big planned. We only have six server racks. The data center floor is sized to have forty. There is not even enough heat to stress one CRAC unit and we have twelve. Six are chilled water and six are Glycol that are fed from primary lines to chillers on the roof. Backup chillers are outside beside the loading dock. No one builds a data center like this unless they are planning something serious being brought in here.”

He had a point.

Even the huge users of our software rarely needed more than one rack for servers and a few for disk arrays. Except for a few rare cases, building AC was more than enough to keep the gear cool, even under a full load. Most just had a UPS in each rack to keep things up long enough for a generator to spin up and come online. Those without generators setup the automatic shutdown processes for the servers and disks. Given what I knew from my time with Robert, he knew his tech. He definitely had something else in the works, which he had kept close to his chest, when Paul ousted him.

Paul’s staff must have been threatened with being burned at the stake if they didn’t have everything cabled and ready for when we arrived. All of the gear was racked, cables were connected and labeled, power was setup redundantly and it looked ready to go.

Damn Robert built a damn good IT team. This is almost as neat as when I have to do the cabling myself.

Seeing it all looked good, we fired everything up. I went through the various post utilities to verify the hosts were seeing the dummy communication LUNs from the disk array, the network cards were linked up at 10 Gig and nothing started smoking.

“So far, so good. I am going to power it down and we can bring the kids down here to watch the entire process from a cold start. Feel free to grab any of your IT staff that you think will be interested. It always helps to have as many people on staff knowing at least a little something about how it is all cabled up and configured for times where they are our remote eyes,” I explained.

I hope Project Kumar is really not as stupid as he looked. These are simple tasks and steps right off our install template. Katie said that was already provided to him when they signed the contract.

I came in and found him looking stumped. The interns were obviously annoyed.

I asked, “Why don’t you show us the project plan so far.”

Does he have some damn slipper dog puppy running around in here that I squished into the carpet?

“I have no project plan ready now. Project plan requires tasks. Tasks must have resource. I have no resources to assign,” he told me.

One of the wallpapered quickie online course project managers. Shit!

Keeping myself calm, I told him, “Please create placeholders for two resource managers, each manager having five staff members working eight hour days.”

Five, four, three, two, one...

“I am sorry, but projects not managed way you tell me,” he told me back politely.

I had to walk out of the room to keep from being unprofessional and going off on him.

I called back to the office to tell the boss to have Katie cancel the contract with whomever we contracted with for Project Kumar.

“What is the problem Joe,” the boss wanted to know.

Sigh!

“It is almost lunchtime and we have nada from him. I gave the interns the project plan template for a regular deployment from install through go-live. He is stuck at needed specific named resources, resource managers, firm work hours and solid commitments from each resource manager for the time of their resources before adding the first task. We now have the rest of today, tomorrow and half of Wednesday to get the servers baking in before they are closed for Christmas. We are paying twice the going rate for senior certified PMP and we got a kid from Project Management 101 express brainwashing. He did not even ask the client what project management software is their standard, instead using some sort of proprietary software package I bet was sold to him at the same brainwashing camp he just finished,” I explained. “I will get their IT manager to fill out the required resource sections in my web based project plan generator while I get started on the install with the interns. If you can’t find any better than this Kumar guy, I will just have to run the project myself until you do. You can pay my LLC the same rates you were going to pay this twit.”

The boss insisted I was overreacting, so I went back to the conference room to put him on speakerphone.

Project Kumar was sitting there with an empty resource pop-up window waiting for input.

Looking mildly upset he said, “What is the name of first name, surname, department, email address and desk number, work cell, personal cell, and home phone number for first of these ‘placeholder’ resource managers.”

Sigh!

“John Doe, Department one, jd@nowhere .123, 111-222-3333,” I replied instead of going off on him.

Holy shit! Does he actually get it now?

Nope.

With a completely straight face he said, “Please go verify you gave me correct email. My program checked I type email address and phone number correctly. When I try to add this John Doe to project resources it say it cannot verify email address and phone number can’t be called.”

My boss beat me to the punch.

“Sir, this is Joe’s boss. It appears there was some my staff miscommunicated our requirements to your employer. We require a senior Certified Project Management Professional,” he started to explain.

Kumar interrupted him angrily with, “I have PMP certification two weeks now. I run many projects. We have problem because your people not giving me what I need to do my jobs. I am most senior project manager at my company.”

Bad move dude!

“Thank you for your time, but your services are no longer required. My legal department has just notified your employer regarding their failure to meet the terms of the contract. Joe will escort you off the customer’s premises,” he said before hanging up.

Damn if Paul didn’t choose now to appear out of the woodwork.

Before he could say a word I asked him if I could have a word in the hallway while Project Kumar packed up his laptop.

“Not a great showing is it,” I asked making the requisite scolded puppy look. “I don’t know where these companies find them, but half the time they send over these boot camp brainwashed project managers. They pay a king’s ransom to get his name on a PMP certificate suitable for framing, or for writing out a suicide note. If everything is straight forward from the book, they run projects like unrelenting demons tormenting you into wanting to give them your soul for them to just go away and stop bugging the hell out of you. Unfortunately they have no ability to think outside of the box that is on their laptop screen. A simple thing like not having specific named resources stopped him cold. I apologize for tying up your conference room. While we wait on my company to get us a seasoned IT project manager, I will run it via the tool we normally use when not hiring a local area contract project manager. Our legal department has validated that my software method does meet the contractual requirements for onsite project management as long as I or my team remain in the local area.”

He must have been holding it all in and damn near passed out from laughing to hard. About the time he got under control he could hear the project manager say something from the conference room and bust out laughing again.

Finally he was under control enough to say, “I was just coming to see if you would give us the honor of kicking his ass out. My security team was working on his access card for the IT floor so he could get into the breakout room we have reserved for this project. When he was doing the background verification checks, his system alerted him about to the fact that this particular contracting company, subsidiaries, employees and contractors were banned by my father from ever coming onto any company property.”

“What the heck did they do to become personas non grata,” I asked.

“Before my time. I had to go down to Legal to find their folder. It was so old it was below the pile of documents on the list to be digitized,” Paul told me. “It seems that they were contracted to manage a major automation upgrade to all of our plants and offices back in the eighties. The project was to only last six months. After two years, the costs were six million dollars over budget. They kept telling the board it was going to take an additional year and another two million to complete. Everything was ordered stopped for Anderson Consulting to come in and audit all expenditures. It only took a week to find out that in all that time, the entire expenditure was for outside contractor hours, travel and consulting fees to figure out how to provide what they said was an off the shelf, turnkey solution. Turns out it was all vaporware. All that ever existed was the theatrical quality presentation some kid did in college for his grad school thesis in psychology.”

Well now I don’t feel so badly about the whole thing with project Kumar.

Whoever Project Kumar had been talking to on his phone about his being fired must have told him to run like hell. Calvin said Project Kumar didn’t even try to fight his laptop bag. He put the bag over his shoulder and carried the laptop as he literally ran for the door. It was when Paul was laughing and I hadn’t noticed.

“He won’t get far. Security is waiting for him downstairs. They will be turning him over to the police for criminal trespass. At the back of the file was a restraining order against their company prohibiting them, their subsidiaries, sub-contractors, even distant relatives five times removed, from coming onto any property owned or leased by anyone in my family,” Paul explained before saying he was going downstairs to supervise having the copies of the restraining order notarized in front of the police.

I went to my laptop, tethered it to my phone and pulled up my project template. I clicked on the check boxes for Calvin, Linda, and Roberta as resources working under me. IT Kumar gave me a quick list of resources that would be working under him. Once they were in, I clicked on the skills they would be providing to the project, what percentage of their time each could give daily and the days in which I could use them as resources. A few more clicks selected that we were building out a QA, Staging and Prod setup. That was it.We had the initial project plan draft in MS Project, since that was what they used here.

“While I start running my team through the hardware validations and start setting up the storage, can you look over the plan to see if you have any changes? The only resource we will need before lunch is one of your network techs. I always go over the WAN setups to ensure all of the ports are setup for LACP Port Aggregation, jumbo frames are enabled and adjust the auto-disable thresholds. All of this should have come in pre-configured from the preferred vendor you selected, but I always take a few minutes to verify.”

Having three interns here allowed me to assign them each to a specific environment to verify the cabling was correct. I had already done it, but it was part of them learning the process. When we powered the servers on, it was their task to go have the network guy check the ports, which they manually traced from the server to switch, were setup correctly. It was good we did that step. Every port configuration was screwed up. While they got them sorted out, I fired up the disk array to get the IPs set to what IT Kumar had assigned for each port.

Ok now I must be back in a dream or hallucination, I never get this lucky.

I had Calvin come over to verify what I was seeing before asking IT Kumar to be a third set of eyes.

“So what is wrong Joe, it looks exactly like what we requested,” he told me.

Well that is not what we told them to order.

I looked at it one more time before he finally explained, “With the recent sales increases of capacities in MLC drives and price pressures, the supplier you gave us said he had a warehouse full of 400 GB SLC SSD drives to get off his books before the end of the year. He said he could write off the losses on his taxes and not have to pay taxes on the inventory we helped him clear out. I don’t have the final numbers, but I think it was just about a hundred grand more to get twice the usable capacity in SSD than your spec sheet required in spinning disks.”

Ok that explains it.

“They were nice enough and pre-partitioned it all for us. I was a bit worried when I saw the odd sizes of the disks. Normally they are four-fifty, six hundred or nine hundred GB SAS drives to give us around twenty-six TiB. These show up as three, sixty-eight GB devices after RAID setups. Being SSD they also put them in RAID 6 instead of the normal mirrored volumes for PROD and RAID 5 for QA and staging,” I told him as I went back to checking everything.

Over the years of working with preferred vendors we fine-tuned the ordering process so that when we get to the customer’s site the gear is just plug and play. The servers ship with a build out doc that has the MACs for the network cards and WWNs for the FC cards. Now that the boxes were up online I was able to see all the cards had logged into the storage array without problem. Once we had the OS installed I would map the storage over to the hosts.