The back alley's bill so far: 7 weeks · See the bill
Now I have to be written down properly, as an order for whoever builds the centre. I can be 40 useful pages, or 900 borrowed ones.
The wrong way
Emilia, the client's new information manager, has to write the order: what information the client needs, in what form, and when. Julian, a consultant, offers to do it for her.
Julian: Leave it with us. We did one last year. Very thorough.
The order arrives. It's 900 pages long. It mentions another client four times, and an airport this client doesn't have.
It asks for 1,400 pieces of data about every asset. Grace, the client's asset manager, and her team use eleven. Nobody can say why the rest is there.
Julian: Another client asked for all of that. It's best practice.
The contractor delivers exactly what the order asked for: 1,400 fields on every asset. Not one is in the client's numbering. Grace's eleven are missing.
Grace's team can't use it, and won't sign for it. But Sam's team delivered exactly what the order asked for, so the fix is a change to the contract, and the client pays for it. Four weeks of rework.
Grace: We asked for everything except what we use.
Sam: We gave you everything you asked for.
Kofi (commercial manager): So the rework is a change. We'll price it.
Meanwhile The Glasshouse runs on a spreadsheet called TEMP. Lou and the night security team queue to look at a single laptop.
Lou: Which escalator is E-0412?
Stan (maintenance engineer): Number two.
Nine hundred pages, somebody else's airport, and the eleven things the owner needed were on none of them.
+4 weeks on the back alley's bill: A borrowed order: 1,400 fields nobody uses, and the eleven they do use missing at handover.