On Hold

Right at the end of the work day yesterday, I got word that another one of our projects has been put on hold. This one accounts for about a third of my charging time -- given that I split my time between about ten projects, a third is a huge chunk to suddenly lose.

It's even bigger for some of the other people in my office, who were charging half or three-quarters of their time to it.

And bigger still for our partner office up in DC that was on this, because those folks were all on this project full-time. Word is that those folks were "encouraged" to take the rest of this week off as vacation.

The project isn't canceled, but the customer has completely re-evaluated what it is they actually want us to do for them, so they've put us on hold (with no funding, naturally) while they re-write the Statement of Work. They've promised to get us that in "2 to 90 days". What the hell kind of timeframe is that, anyway? Two days wouldn't be so bad, but if it goes three months, then I can guarantee most of the DC office will have found new jobs before it comes back!

And knowing this customer and the huge pile o' delays that they've heaped on us before... it'll be closer to 90 days than 2. And quite probably more like 180 days.

No one in my office was on that project full-time, but it amounted to about three peoples' worth of employment, altogether. So that's another big hit on top of the proposal we lost last week. I still haven't heard anything about layoffs, but it doesn't look good.