Sigma
One of my projects from hell I will tell as an analogy. As you know, an analogy is a comparison of two things based on shared qualities or relationships. The things represented in the analogy are true. But not the sausages comparison. Let's say a company created a successful sausage recipe that blends chicken and noodles. Now, they are trying to update their sausage‐making facilities for the 21st century. Let's call our company Link‐a‐Doodle‐Doo.
Imagine a gourmet sausage kitchen run by two master butchers. One dreams of exotic space‐age sausage. This sausage has rare spices, zero‐gravity‐cured meats, and transparent casing. It's like something from Star Trek. One prefers a hearty bratwurst. It has just chicken, salt, and a hand crank. This is the KISS group.
To end the debate, they hire a pro sausage maker, the Systems Integrator, to create the perfect recipe. At the first tasting, no one reads the recipe. Instead, the butchers throw in last‐minute demands:
At the next tasting, the butchers have forgotten what changes they asked for:
So, new tweaks are demanded. Again.
This cycle repeats. Each batch swings wildly between space‐chorizo and Amish kielbasa. Occasionally, the mix comes full circle‐back to the original recipe. But by then, nobody remembers that is where they started. So they tweak it again.
The grinder keeps turning, the casing keeps bursting, and no one is sure if they're making dinner or a food fight.
Moral of the analogy: Without clear direction, documentation, and with the client paying attention to the ongoing process, high‐tech systems design will likely end in chaos and waste.
Creating a top‐notch digital television facility should be like making a fine product. However, it feels more like cooking sausage with two chefs who disagree on the recipe and the reasons behind it.
To recap: We had two engineering factions:
The Star Trek Group wants an IP‐based, virtualized, cloud‐aware facility, 8K camera readiness, and robotic everything. Maybe throw in some holograms. To them, if it can't talk to an Integrated Security System (ISS ‐ is a security platform that provides multi‐layered security features and intrusion detection at the field device, network, and control system levels) it's obsolete.
The KISS Group (Keep It Knife‐Switch Simple) wants everything to be grounded, labeled, and rack‐mounted. This includes SDI patch panels, manual overrides, and extra power for the backup power. No magic. No mystery.
To navigate this, the company hires a Systems Integrator (SI). This skilled sausage maker begins by drafting blueprints from general input.
The SI ends up in the same nonfunctional dynamic. Except now they are held responsible for the internal confusion of the client.
The SI starts the conceptual design process, only to encounter the same client internal merry‐go‐round. So the conceptual design meetings start. The SI shares a sausage mix, which means the system design. That's when the chefs begin adding ingredients from the floor once again.
Everyone nods. The SI revises the drawings. But by the next meeting, no one remembers why they asked for extra pepper or removed the nitrates. They're confused about the previous recipe, so they make new changes, equally arbitrary.
This cycle continues: One day, NDI is the future. Next week, it's "never trust video over IP." NDI stands for Network Device Interface, a video connectivity standard that enables multimedia systems to identify and communicate with one another over IP and to encode, transmit, and receive high‐quality, low‐latency, frame‐accurate video and audio, and exchange metadata in real‐time.
Some sections of the design return to the original SI proposal. Yet, they have added details that make them hard to recognize. Then the process starts over.
Meanwhile, budgets bloat, and team morale drops. Everyone starts whispering "scope creep" in hushed tones. And everyone wonders why they can't go on air by NAB.
From what I remember, this may not be completely accurate, but the theme and tone are right. Let's call it a One Act play about the first formal conceptual design review meeting.
A long, bright conference room feels heavy with fatigue, bureaucracy, and burnt coffee. The shiny oak table sits surrounded by around 40 members of the cable network' engineering and management teams. Each person has a company‐issued BlackBerry that buzzes softly, like insects trapped under a wine glass.
In front of the room, an engineer from the systems integrator stands. He leans slightly under the projector's light, nervously flipping through his part of the 800‐page design deck. His domain? 40 pages of audio and intercom infrastructure. One of many critical subsystems that glues the facility together.
He clicks to the next slide. No one notices. He starts explaining how to assign audio resources. This involves six studios and five control rooms. The design took weeks of planning and three sleepless nights.
Still, people bow their heads‐not in reverence, but in BlackBerry prayer. Thumbs twitch. Eyes dart. A gentle noise of tiny plastic clicks fills the air around the table, like an electronic rainstorm.
Now and then, the presenter catches something odd:
Across the table, an engineering manager subtly glances up from his device.
He makes eye contact with the presenter‐just for a moment‐then smirks.
A second later, a woman three seats down lets out a tiny chuckle, glancing over at the manager.
She too returns to her BlackBerry, typing feverishly.
They aren't texting about the fiber loop redundancy.
No‐this is a roasting circle, a silent mockery chain in real time.
Someone mentioned the engineer's voice or his term "signal integrity." Perhaps they're making fun of the clip‐art router on Slide 16. Or maybe they've found, as they often do, that they're already going against design choices they made two meetings ago.
The presenter soldiers on. His pointer shakes as he outlines the MADI routes. His voice begins to crack, half from nerves, half from the dry desert of indifference he's standing in.
A VP in the corner nods‐not at the presentation, but because his afternoon latte has kicked in. Behind him, another executive scrolls through his inbox. By Slide 35, the presenter realizes he's mostly talking to his own reflection in the monitor.
He keeps going. That's what pros do, even with ghosts and digital hecklers all around. He finishes his 40 pages. There's a pause.
No questions. No comments. Just another gentle buzz as a new round of texts circulates.
It wasn't a design meeting. It was a performance in a room where the audience had left, but had forgotten to take their bodies with them.
Now, by this time, still early in the project lifecycle, the project was way behind. The client made it very clear that they were not happy with our performance. So the upper management of the SI was in attendance to see what we were doing wrong.
It took three days of meetings to present the conceptual design. Again, not the final design, just the high‐level conceptual. Our upper SI handlers were gobsmacked. Out of around 300 conceptual drawings for the facility, about 36 got client approval. All the rest had another round of changes to be made. While this was to be the final conceptual design review, the client had seen all these drawings at least a half‐dozen times. Some drawings they had seen many more times than that.
The rest of the project slowly got better. Through the detail design, the part that gets deep into the weeds, the client seemed to get better. I believe the fighting between the "Star Wars" and "knife switch" groups has finally gotten too intense and had risen to the top layers. The clients' handlers told them to stop the games and "get 'er done" or else.
In any project, there are always three aspects that come into play. Those are the client, the project itself, and the team assigned to complete the project. In my experience, often one of the three can be challenging.
In the case of this project, its scope was such that that aspect would be challenging in itself. Add a client that most of the time was not engaged, and as a whole the organization wasn't sure of what it wanted. Two out of three were shaky (I was a part of the project team, so I won't pass judgment on that), and it would have been very easy for the whole thing to simply auger straight into the ground.
