I recently spoke of a friend of mine and his company where projects stall for various reasons.

They have several projects on the go at the moment and their salesmen are getting lots more customers. This is obviously pleasing the brass but I’m not convinced they can deliver as they don’t appear to have the manpower. In fact they have more salesmen than they have people to populate some of their newer projects so heaven knows where those projects are going.

They are taking on staff at a rate of knots but getting them up to speed is taking time. They have even taken on some contractors, which is new to the company and also, unhelpfully, they are first time contractors. So the new contractors have to be told to get limited companies, get an accountant, register for VAT, how to invoice and what can they can claim as expenses. The company, who has never taken on any contractors before, don’t even know how to write out a contract yet. No doubt there will be a certain amount of concentration of minds when the contractor sends in his first invoice and no one knows what to do with it. Pay it? You can just imagine the accounts department suddenly getting this invoice from a person for services supplied and saying ‘who is this guy sending us invoices’.

The friend of mine has been asked to demo the software next week to yet another prospective client and yet when I said to him ‘what’s the point you haven’t the manpower to do the work even if they wanted the software’, he thought about it. He could, I suppose, mess up the demo so the client doesn’t buy it but that goes against the grain a bit and the salesmen aren’t going to be happy seeing their commission fly out the window.

They’ve started to take on older IT staff, you know those ‘stale’ people that have been knocking around IT for decades and have way too much experience. A lot of the developers, who are in their 20′s and early 30′s hate that and have fought tooth and nail not to take anybody on much older than themselves. And one of their weapons is to call all experienced IT people ‘stale’.

Well, I’m definitely ’stale’, though I don’t feel it. There’s also no way I’d join that company with all of their projects probably going ‘dead’. Ho-bloody-hum.

Quote of the day

‘When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt laws are broken’ Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)