#vagueroadmap

I’ve been here long enough to see the pattern clearly, where we start projects with great enthusiasm, teams form, plans get made, and work begins with real momentum. Then a few months in someone in leadership reads an article or hears a new buzzword and everything changes, new priorities appear, old projects suddenly get labeled as not aligned, and the goal posts move so far you can barely see them anymore.

We end up abandoning half finished work and starting fresh on whatever the new thing is supposed to be, and the amount of wasted effort that piles up from that cycle is staggering because hours, weeks, and months of people’s time just get discarded when leadership cannot stick with a direction.

Then leadership turns around and wonders why execution is a problem, even though you cannot execute anything when the target keeps moving before the work ever has a chance to finish.

Big internal programs like this almost always arrive wrapped in promise and land in phases, pilots, exceptions, “next wave.” Especially at Dell Technologies scale. Even when the intent is real, gravity is real too.

What tends to happen in practice:

Year 1: decks, roadmaps, leadership optimism

Year 2: partial tools, parallel systems, extra clicks

Year 3: the thing quietly becomes “how we’ve always done it,” just renamed