It is so interesting what people start doing without knowing the full details of what is going on. The project at work is coming to an interesting head with some of the managers worrying if we can pull this thing off as some new obstacles have come into play that may cause some problems with us meeting our deadlines.
Right now, we are relying on another group to go into mass production of parts we need for our project. We have done the initial R&D, but the problem with this other group is that there are still many remaining issues to getting the parts we need at a high enough quality. A deadline will be coming up and some people are uncertain that they will be able to produce the parts, within spec, by the required time.
The development process will be passed onto this other group and we will move on to a different phase of the project and it seems that one of the managers and a few of my colleagues are uncertain about this other group pulling through and they want a risk hedge. The interesting thing is that development of this part, after some internal shuffling has been passed onto me and there has already been some underground improvements and design changes made to a prototype to solve some problems and the new design has been presented. Unfortunately for the new part to be put into the system, we need cooperation with other groups, meaning that the development of this new part cannot be kept secret.
Since there hasn't been too much upper level communication about this project and the real objective of this new design wasn't entirely clear as many people had different objectives in mind, I decided to try and clear things up by going public with the project. Upper management responded that we should halt work on it and save our resources for something else. Personally, I think they are right as a new version of this prototype is coming out and the project is going to switch over to that, but some people are still smacking for some kind of risk hedge and want to continue this current project "underground" and I would have to work on it.
My visibility on the whole project is not broad enough to understand everything that is going on at the moment, but given that we are transferring production to another group and we are close to the end run of production on this end, I don't see how we can produce these new parts, test them and perform feed back in a meaningful way if the design is going to change and we are close to finishing up here. People are worried that the other group may fail and we may have to fall back to the original design and hence we should continue work.
As there are too many unknowns at this point, I think it is kind of imprudent to start pouring resources into a separate project where we do not know the outcome or if it will be needed in the future, especially if I have to do it "underground" and it will cost me additional time out of my evenings to work on this. I also probably will not be able to report on this project and thus when I can't talk about it during my performance review, my efforts cannot really thrown into discussion. There is no incentive for me for in this project and there are to many unknowns that I cannot justify myself into working on this project.
On a second note, if you want to really do an underground project, you also need to have access to all the necessary resources on your own without requiring support of management to pull it off. I am pretty good at running "shoe string" experiments/projects but considering I need resources from other groups and need to schedule things into different lines, it would be hard to keep this project a secret. If someone wants to really do it, I am going to have to tell them to do it themselves.
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