Work · PM · TPM
Neither Two Weeks Nor Five Months
My manager wanted an entire exchange shut down in two weeks, a job that normally takes four to five months. I didn't refuse. I came back with a plan that did it in half the normal time.
- Result
- 2.5 months
- Role
- Technical Programme Manager, Vodafone (via Interactive Management Solutions)
- When
- 2019–present
The ask
My senior manager wanted an entire exchange (MTX) shut down in two weeks. Work like this normally takes four to five months.
Not a flat no
Some things take the time they take, and more urgency doesn’t compress them on its own. I made that case with three reasons, in order: the technical sequencing that governed the work, the failure risk a two-week timeline guaranteed, and the fact that my team wasn’t going to work weekends they hadn’t signed up for.
I didn’t leave it there. I came back with a counter-proposal, somewhere between the two-week ask and the normal five months.
How the compression actually happened
- It was our second exchange shutdown. We already knew the playbook.
- Workstreams ran in parallel, not in the usual sequence.
- Specialist resources were booked ahead of time, before they became the bottleneck.
- We triaged by risk: I took the traffic-impacting links myself; the team took the dead ones.
- Executive urgency became executive air cover. The pressure from above helped get change requests approved even inside a change-freeze window.
Result
- Completed in 2.5 months, close to half the normal timeline, with zero escalations and no service impact.
- The team was formally recognised for it.
The job wasn’t to say yes or no to two weeks. It was to find what was actually achievable, and go get it.