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74 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

As Uni began to reinterpret their partnership with ConsultCo by seeking com-
promise, the VP decided to mediate divergent goals and beliefs by using his
power and influence to get things done. The VP began by exerting his power
over the project and hired an enterprise computing expert as Technical Director
of Administrative Systems whose charge was to stop waiting for ConsultCo and
‘ramp up’ the technical development in time for the Y2K deadline. In addition to
refocusing the project team through strong leadership, the VP and newly hired
Director felt that it was necessary to give ConsultCo an ultimatum. The Technical
Director explains,
We were in crisis in late spring of ’98. The grants management piece was simply not
working and [the other module] had not even been delivered. And so it was clear
to me [and others] that there was no way we were going to meet the July ’99 date
[given] the state we were [at in] May of ’98. That’s the first time . . . that we were
going to tell [ConsultCo] that we were going to chuck ‘em on grants – that we were
going to come up with an alternative strategy. That would have been bad news for
them because that’s how they want[ed] to sell this market . . . So we went through
the discipline of [asking] ‘what would we do instead’? And it was ugly, messy, not
ideal – but we were prepared to do it. We really meant business – if they couldn’t
execute we were not going to install.
The VP was influential in achieving concessions from ConsultCo because of his ability
to mobilize Uni resources towards alternative development activities during a crucial
time when the project was experiencing paralysis. In-house technical expertise was
mobilized:
. . . I had the geniuses working for me . . . I asked them to do the detailed homework and
gave them full empowerment . . . so that we could create the development that had
to be done . . . and that required taking the geniuses from other groups like the Ware-
house [team] and making it happen [Technical Director of Administrative Systems]
The VP also made a personal visit to ConsultCo headquarters where he indicated
that there was indeed ‘no free lunch’ available for the vendor but rather they had
an obligation to repay Uni for its commitment to developing the higher education
product. While the project team ‘geniuses’ continued to develop an alternative solu-
tion for grant and labor functionality, ConsultCo produced what they called ‘essential’
functionality in time for Uni’s fiscal year 2000 and Uni chose not to drop ConsultCo
as a development partner. Their continued involvement with the vendor is directly
related to their own interests for a robust product which they understand will only
be achieved if they are able to influence ConsultCo’s behaviour and development tra-
jectory by visiting the vendor and being involved in product functionality decisions,
despite the costs involved:
We sent a team of people out to California for two weeks in June to do Beta testing
on the [new] versions of those applications . . . It costs a lot of money to do that and
it costs a lot of resource time but we think that it’s worth it in the long run [Team
leader].

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