It’s been revealed that large enterprise systems have a terrible track record for success—about 75 per cent fail or go way over budget. I put this dire statistic together with the postulation that the universe itself is really just a vast enterprise system. But that idea always infers that it’s a successful system. What if God knew nothing of project management? What if He just jumped in and started making the cosmos with no clear plan of where he was going?
Here’s one scenario:
On the first day, God rested. He figured He had a whole week to create the cosmos so “hey, like what’s the rush?”
On the second day, God got up, made a cup of coffee, and checked His email. He had over 7 million messages.
Most were spam.
On the third day, God logged into Facebook and updated His status—28,000 times.
Then He tweeted about it.
On the fourth day, God realized that He had better start to seriously do something about creating the cosmos, so after lunch He created the night and the day. But then He realized that it might be too dark at night (even with the moon, which he hadn’t created yet), and people would get lost or fall down in the dark and would probably curse His name, so He revised His decision about creating the day and the night deciding that it might be a bit rash without considering all the repercussions of this cosmos building stuff before jumping in.
He resolved to sleep on it and start fresh the next day.
On the fifth day, God got an idea. He decided that He’d create the waters and the firmament. “Oh my God”, said God, “That would be so cool”.
But then He thought, “What’s the point of water and firmament (does anybody even know what the heck “firmament” is anyway?) with nothing to swim in it or fly through it? Instead, He thought it would be super fantastic to create all the birds, bats, insects and other flying things as well as all the fishes that swim in the sea.
He stayed up really late creating all that cool stuff.
The sixth day wasn’t a good day for God. On the sixth day, God woke to find that, without the water and the firmament, all the birds of the air and fishes of the sea had died horrible deaths. It was pretty depressing (and it smelt bad too).
God wasted most of the sixth day cleaning up from the fifth.
On the seventh day, God woke up in a cold sweat well before His alarm clock rang. It was dark and cold and He realized He’d done nothing useful to create the cosmos. He told Himself that He’d certainly tried—”but life can be so unfair, you know”—and now He didn’t have a prayer of getting the cosmos ready in time. What He needed was a miracle.
And just as he was about to curse His fate for the third time, God noticed a handbill from Wal-Mart and it was offering a ready-made cosmos for sale. At these double discounted prices, God knew this would cover His Ass perfectly. Sure it was cheap and made mostly of plastic and particleboard (probably in some country with dubious labour practices and no environmental regulations), but with all the plug n’ play features, it would do just fine as a last-minute solution.
God thought, “Hell, why not?”
On the eighth day as God checked out of Wal-Mart, He then noticed that, where His original idea for the cosmos stressed cooperation, this pre-fab version was built on the Darwin model of competition–survival of the fittest. “Oh well”, thought God, “It didn’t matter really.” He was out of time and short on good excuses.
“Besides”, God said to Himself as He left the parking lot,
“No one would even know the difference.”
—Gary Wagner, PMP, Product Manager, Alea Software