So... I'm landing a one-winged flaming aircraft of a project.

Tl;dr: baby PM+team inherits trojan horse project that needed to be restarted a month before the delivery date, and just may sufficiently compress months of processes to meet impossible deadlines two weeks away.

Short career: engineer, supervisor, manager, and now project manager as of this last spring. From one tiny data integrity assessment to get me started, to half the PM staff quitting within my first two weeks, to inheriting over a dozen of their projects immediately. I still haven't completed some of my onboarding training. All things considered, I've completed a few of the projects, and am managing, for now.

But this one project... my sweet sweet project management butthole. I turned to my boss's boss at the end of week 3 of my new job, stared him straight in the eyes, and stated, "I did not bring enough lube for this." He gave out a pained laugh with eyes that were screaming, "Me too, buddy."

The site was given several hundred million to make a state of the art building years ago, and put the new line in this year, with the expectation to produce tens of millions in revenue per day. This project was to create and qualify a few virtual machine servers to handle serialization of pharmaceutical products for that line, which is slated to start running in early fall.

For those curious, "Serialization" is a barcode printing, checking, and registration process that marks every unit with a unique barcode, marries those units' barcodes to a carton's unique barcode, marries those carton barcodes to a box's unique barcode, and marries those boxes' barcodes to a pallet's unique barcode. That marrying process is called aggregation, and those associations between barcodes and which ones were used gets reported to regulatory bodies. The purpose is to trace and prevent illegal product diversion and prevent fake products. Anyway... back to the story:

Things seemed to be going ok since I inherited the project. I got resources arranged, purchase orders issued, requirements and specs good, documents routing for approval... and then a few months ago, the server VMs got made wrong, were 'accidentally' de-joined from the domain, couldn't have SQL, and a host of other issues which rendered them effectively unusable. Corporate IT admitted less than a month ago there was nothing they could do to fix things and would take at least a month, if not two, to make new VMs. Then the non-responsive vendor actually sent over their prerequisite manual and installation guide a few weeks ago, which revealed we would also have to create IT policy exceptions for the software to even run. This exception process usually takes a quarter, or more. Lastly, my project team is half European and they're taking the month of August off... so I guess that means we have until the end of July to get everything done... oh yeah, and no overtime allowed for me or any of my non-salaried team.

So yeah, my team and I were 99.9999% fucked; probably why the prior PMs ditched to other companies. We needed to create new server VMs for the serialization software, install the databases in a way corp db team would still support, get the db and IT exceptions approved so we can have the VMs released, and get dozens of *very* lengthy documents approved, all so we can have the vendor remote in to do their installs. We got one VM yesterday and the rest to follow shortly, the exception process is 90% done, and the vendor install is tomorrow, and all the documents are slated to be approved by the end of Monday. We weren't able to submit the request for the exception process until Friday and had it officially started Monday.

The project team, to my boss and boss's boss, to even the IT exception team, are all shocked we're this far along, let alone this close to being done with the project on time and under budget.

We started this sprint from ground zero 9 days ago, and we've got 8 more business days to be done with everything. My team and I have been up into associate vice president level inboxes and rearranging global IT schedules to get this done... and we just might pull this off. Just maybe...

We're dying, I'm dying, but yeah... after this is done. That will be one flaming airplane landed with next to no casualties.

I'll be raising my rates, and taking time off. A month sounds nice...

Then it'll be time to land a few more flaming aircraft before the end of the year. Hoping to be down to 3-5 projects by then.