why we'll never win a war here

I've been thinking this week that my project is a microcosm example of why Westerners will never succeed here.

I didn't want to come back to do this project. But the customer begged me. They even put in the statement of work that I had to be the consultant. I made demands for the project to ensure it would be a success, such as getting to pick the team that would work for me, having a proper work area (conference room, projector, white board), and having customer commitment. Oh sure, they said, you'll get everything you want.

Then I get here and it's like an out of control circus. Our working environment is horrible and we never have enough room to even set up our laptops. Forget working groups, the conference room is hardly ever available, and even when we have it booked we can be thrown out at the customer's whim. My company assigned a project manager who has something personal against me, and she is constantly reassigning my resources so, on a daily basis, I have no idea which team members will be showing up. That wouldn't be bad if at least they were doing other work but they aren't. They are sitting at home, or in the office, doing nothing while I have to struggle to do their work on top of mine because I don't want to blow my schedule.

The customer has tons of political issues going on in the company and they keep trying to involve my team in them. Keeping some of the junior members out of this game has been hard because they think they are gaining some power from this mess when in fact it's more like a set up. Keeping my company's resources working even 4 hours a day when I'm here is hard, and when I'm gone it's a disaster. Only the sub contractor working on the project is reliable. If I didn't have him I don't know what I would do. Meanwhile, there's a lot of pressure from my company to make this a referenceable project even though they are doing everything they can to sabotage it.

The customer has unreasonable deadlines for things, and try to force me to drop current tasks to work on unrelated, non-critical tasks. Then they ask me "why isn't this critical task done?" Even though I have a chain of emails showing I've been redirected and they've accepted that by forcing me to work on a non-critical task they are introducing risk of something critical not getting completed they refuse to take any responsibility.

And then they fire the people who are supposed to help us figure out who in the company we need to work with, and have assigned a new guy who's been with the company for one month and who doesn't even have a desk to sit at to be the head of the project.

And that's the way business is done here. Finger pointing back to the people who are trying to help. No matter how hard you work, someone is always unhappy and critical. People play political games and back stab each other and then try to force us poor consultants to take sides. And in the end, when we leave, I'm sure they'll claim that the project is a failure because it's easier to do nothing than to actually learn how to be self sufficient and successful.

People work here for years. I don't know how. Oh wait, I do. Last night at a happy hour with some people from a sister company it was recommended I get a prescription for xanax.