Group Efforts 21

Group Efforts
The Diary of a Workgroup Manager

Episode 48 (1998)

Join our hero and his team in a special week-long Takeover Special Edition, as they live through the five days that will change their futures.

Monday 27th
Cathy's ill, so I attend Amrat's second "Preparing for Windows 98" session. It appears to be Internet Explorer 4.0 with a few new device drivers, although there are some other goodies. Amrat describes a promising one, OnNow, which puts the PC into a sleep state ready for instant reawakening. He then says our PCs haven't got the right BIOS chips for it. Losing interest, I join George and Andy's back-row discussion of the takeover latest, which is that Costello's found a White Knight. I say I've never heard of them, and Andy explains that 'White Knight' means a preferred bidder with benign intentions, and that this one's called Broadleys PLC. Confused, I return to Amrat, who's explaining that FAT 32 will free masses of disk space on everything except the DriveSpace-compressed volumes most of us have. Utterly flabbergasted, I escape to the washrooms.

Tuesday 28th
Good news at the management meeting, as a disgruntled Llewllyn announces the postponement of his NT Server blitzkreig pending 'resolution of the proposed merger situation'. This is our cue to quiz Costello, who says that Broadleys see us as a complementary acquisition, and that our board are supporting their bid. In the canteen, Andy explains that 'complementary' means 'less lay-offs than synergistic', prompting relief-laden sighs all round . These are dampened, however, by a passing Llewellyn, who glances pointedly around the table and says they'll still want to cut out the dead wood, then departs with Andy's quickfire 'they'll dump the rotten stuff first', bouncing off his back. Spirits are revived by George's comment that IT departments are by definition synergistic units, and a round of teas completes the healing process.

Wednesday 29th
Our mid-morning office break resembles an edition of Mastermind, with me in the hot seat. Rose and June ask what White Knight's hourly rates are, and I patiently explain that this particular Knight is called Broadleys, and that we're complementary so the rates will stay the same. Danny asks about the integrated Satellite TV capabilities of Windows 98, and I tell him we've got the wrong sort of BIOS chips. Cathy, true to form, asks about Broadleys' management training programme, and I reply that nothing's sealed and we could still end up owned by the conglomerate, whose principal management skill is asset-stripping. Relief comes when Sheila's PC locks solid with a 10-page costs list trapped inside. I call Amrat, who arrives in person and asks what I know about Broadleys IT strategy. Replying with a three-letter acronym, I retreat to my office and pull down the blinds.

Thursday 30th
We can only wait now, and in the meantime life must go on. Amazingly, we're still officially operating the four year old peer to peer networking pilot project, and it's time for yet another progress report. As always, I decide that the real benefits - multi-user Lottery worksheets, shared Cinemania CD-ROMs, policing Danny's hard disk - don't look good on paper, so substitute ' complementary pan-departmental device sharing' instead. The B2's Bob, in to update our NetWare bindings, says the whole world's going to end up as one big peer network, with IP-addressed fridges and microwaves emailing recipes to each other. I reflect that, in our own modest way, we've helped to pioneer the P2P concept. Whatever happens to us now, we can always be proud of that.

Friday 1st
An 11am all-staff meeting summons indicates that the Big Day has arrived. Mercifully Costello and the Old Man get straight to the point, announcing that we are now a part of the Broadleys PLC group, and will trade as a semi- autonomous division with no immediate changes. There are seats on the Broadleys board for our two leaders, but as Andy later points out, the MD is no longer master of his own ship, a bitter blow for a man who once strode giant-like across the industry. The mood at the All-Stars wake is sombre until someone remarks that Llewellyn, who fancied a career as a conglomerate hatchet-man, was seen leaving early with an air of deep disappointment. This, plus some rough calculations of our share-option payouts, cheers everyone up, and we toast the future with another round of Peg's finest ales.