By Dean Costello
6 January 2002

My company strictly performs(?) consulting for the U.S. government. Here is a story I received from a friend of mine at the [unnamed U.S. governmental entity]:

Once upon a time there was a shepherd looking after his sheep on the edge of a deserted road. Suddenly a brand new Jeep Cherokee screeches to a halt next to him.

The driver, a young man dressed in a Brioni suit, Cerutti shoes, Ray-Ban glasses, Jovial Swiss wristwatch and a Bhs tie gets out and asks the shepherd: If I guess how many sheep you do have, will you give me one of them? The shepherd looks at the young man, then looks at the sheep which graze and says: All right.

The young man parks the car, connects the notebook and the mobile-fax, enters a NASA site, scans the ground using his GPS, opens a database and 60 excel tables filled with algorithms, then prints a 150-pages report on his high-tech mini-printer. He turns to the shepherd and says: You have exactly 1586 sheep here. The shepherd answers: That's correct, you can have your sheep.

The young man takes the sheep and puts in the back of his jeep. The shepherd looks at him and asks: If I guess your profession, will you return my sheep to me? The young man answers: Yes, why not.

The shepherd says: You are a consultant.

How did you know? asks the young man.

Very simple, answers the shepherd: First you come here without being called. Second, you charge me fees to tell something I already knew. Third, you do not understand any thing about my business or what I do, and because you took my dog.

The following is my response to my friend at the EPA.

Several notes before we get onto the actual story:

1). FTE is "Full-Time Equivalents", i.e. people who can be assigned to a specific task full-time. Example: "I need someone to finish this guidance document; it'll take about 3 FTE." This is not to be confused with LOE, Level of Effort, which describes how many man-hours will be required to finish a project. Example: "I need someone to finish this guidance document; it will take about 19,000 LOE."

2). My manager is female, which is why I described the project manager as a fore(wo)man. Which I guess is obvious, in retrospect.

3). Slavemasters are the contract managers at the specific agency or department we are contracted to. To paraphrase, there is much opportunity for mischief when it comes to dealing with contractors.

4). The rest of the metaphors are ham-fisted enough to be obvious to most middle managers.

5). This tends to pretty accurately describe the process of negotiating work assignments with the [unnamed U.S. governmental entity]. I hear often about 300% cost overruns with large projects, but I'll be damned if it's ever happened to us. We get dinged on our monthly invoices if there (in their opinion) are too many phone calls to the clients.

The Consultant Strikes Back

Once upon a time there was a shepherd looking after his sheep on the edge of a deserted road.

He says to himself, "My sheep are dirty. If they weren't dirty, their wool would be more valuable." So, he asks his Section Chief at the Sheep Protection Agency (SPA) how he can make his sheep less dirty.

The Section Chief says, "I dunno. We don't have enough FTE to do that anyway. Get one of the slavemasters to get someone to take care of it."

So he calls one of the slavemasters and says, "My sheep are dirty. I need them undirty," and the slavemaster replies, "I've got just the right group of slave to do it, but because they might have forgotten the key skills required to undirty sheep since they were last tasked to work on sheep three weeks ago, they have to prove themselves one more time that they can take care of the sheep, but must do it in less time than before or else they will be flogged."

Now the shepherd says that he really doesn't care that they may get the job done a bit faster, just that it gets done soon for about 20 minutes per sheep, but the slavemaster will hear none of that.

So, the slavemaster goes to the slave's fore(wo)man and says, "We've got this job to work on undirtying sheep. You want it?"

The fore(wo)man replies, "Of course! Look at all the slaves working for me!" The slavemaster asks how long it will take to clean the sheep, and the fore(wo)man says, "Oh, we did it last time for about 15 minutes/sheep, so I think that that would be about right."

In a fury, the slavemaster yells, "NO! You must do it in...uhhh...5 minutes per sheep!"

The fore(wo)man replies, "Ohhhh. We'll need to get back to you about this, since this is way below what we can normally and effectively do."

After a couple of days, the fore(wo)man says to the slavemaster, "I talked with my supervisors, and we might be able to do it for 12 minutes/sheep, but that is really cutting into the effectiveness of the sheep processing."

This time, in a righteous fury, the slavemaster replies, "Slave! You will do it in 5 minutes, or you and all of your people will be flogged!" The fore(wo)man whimpers, lies prostrate on the dirt floor in front of the slavemaster, begs forgiveness, and promises to remove the dirt from the sheep in the best possible way manageable, full well knowing that 5 minutes per sheep is ludicrous, at best.

Soon thereafter, the fore(wo)man approaches the shepherd and says, "Oh shepherd, I represent a group of slaves who have been tasked by your slavemaster to take care of your sheep. Now, what precisely do you want us to do?"

The shepherd, annoyed since it has taken so long to get the slaves onboard says, "I want the dirt out of them. Pronto."

"Out of the wool?"

"Yes."

"So, you want us to clean them?"

"No, I want you to get the dirt out of their wool so I can sell the wood at a higher price."

"Ummm, so you want us to clean them?"

"No, foolish slaves! I want you to get the dirt out!"

The fore(wo)man's assistant nudges her with an elbow and says, "Okay, so you want us to get the dirt out of the wool, but you don't want us to clean the wool. Right?"

"Precisely. You are particularly thick-headed slaves, aren't you?"

"Uhh, yes. You are correct, sir," and the slaves return to their enclosure to build new slave quarters near to the shepherds sheep pens (which was a requirement for getting the job), train their colleagues in working with sheep (even though they just finished a sheep job a few weeks ago the SPA demanded that the slaves be retrained), and get some cleaning supplies (which they had to order from an SPA-approved vendor).

They arrive the next week to start working on the sheep. The shepherd is puzzled and asks why they are there. The slaves look at each other puzzled, and the fore(wo)man says, "To clean..." the assistant nudges her again, "No, to remove the dirt from the sheep?"

The shepherd stares off in the distance for a bit, and after some scraping of feet and exchanging of glances amongst the slaves, says, "Oh yeah, sheep. Okay, wait here while I call them in," and he wanders off.

The slaves squat down to wait for the shepherd. The next morning, the shepherd arrives at the sheep pens and finds the slaves still squatting in the dirt waiting for him. "Oh look at you, why are you here?"

The fore(wo)man replies, "We were waiting for you to return with the sheep, oh shepherd."

The shepherd stares at the fore(wo)man for a few moments with a blank look of incomprehension, and with a start replies, "Oh yeah, that's right. Sheep. Hang on a bit," and wanders off again.

Later that afternoon, 20 sheep arrive with the shepherd, and the slaves start to work. They finish the 20 sheep in about 90 minutes, slightly ahead of schedule so they wouldn't get flogged and maybe even get a fig or pomegranate each for finishing faster than expected.

The fore(wo)man reports to the shepherd, "Well, we we're finished. We were able to finish up faster since the slavemaster promised us 1586 sheep to do, but you gave us 20, so we ended up bringing way too many slaves out here to the job. Can we get our figs now?"

"I can't give you the figs for getting done faster since I noticed that you were cleaning the sheep, as opposed to getting the dirt out of them. I won't have you flogged, but I won't authorize any figs."

The forewoman sighs and says, "Whatever. When will the rest of the sheep be here?"

The shepherd says, "Why are you asking me this; there are no other sheep."

The fore(wo)man is confused and asks, "The slavemaster told us to expect 1586 sheep. Why did you only bring 20 sheep out here?"

The shepherd replies, "Well, I figured that there would be a maximum of 1586 sheep, but we really didn't expect much more than a couple dozen."

In exasperation, the fore(wo)man yelled, "Then why didn't you tell us there would only be a couple of dozen, so that we wouldn't have to go through the trouble of building slave quarters out here, or training the slaves, or ordering the speciality get-the-dirt-out-of-the-wool compounds from vendors that only you will approve?" "Because if we didn't," the shepherd replied in a hurt tone, "You wouldn't have bid on the job."

<< Back to True Stories

<< Back to Bad Managers