I got hired two and a half years ago to be a solution architect and create and lead the accelerator team on a 90M multi-vendor transformation and data migration project.
The accelerator team would find manual, error prone work that was a good candidate for productization, create MVPs and make the work of everyone else on the team faster. The goal was to eventually use these tools and processes in the larger practice within the energy and utilities space.
When I started, we had 25 people on the team including with seven senior technical people leading their own work streams or doing overall program management and practice development. This was the first project of its kind in this industry that my company had done.
Almost exactly a year ago my boss, the overall project lead, quit along with his peer in a parallel organization due to disagreements with leadership. Since then we've lost 10 more people including all the two of the senior technical resources. Me and one of the remains. We've hired a few people to fill in the gaps but they have all been on the project less than 4 months some of them only one.
My best developer has gotten very concerned about the attrition and just gave us two weeks notice last night. The last remaining Junior technical resource on a very specialized and technically complex workstream told me this week that is quit date is in 6 weeks if things don't change. I know of at least three other people who will be quitting in 1 to 6 months depending on what happens and what their job prospects are.
I've been raising the alarm to leadership that we need to stop this Boulder of attrition that keeps rolling down the hill. We had a meeting with the whole team and the business unit head (3 or 4 levels above me) along with my boss's boss and a few other very high level people. I told my team to come to that meeting with hard questions. None of those questions were answered with any substance. I've been told off the books that there is no chance of promotions for junior people who are backfilling senior roles (and doing an admirable job of it).
The client has escalated multiple times due to attrition and the perceived lack of the right talent on this team. I agree with them. We are going to start missing milestones and the quality of the work is already slipping. I'm providing emergency coverage for program management project management escalations vendor management contracts and change orders and a bunch of other things that I have no prior experience or training to do.
We've had people added who were on the bench because they're free and available but we can't seem to get the right technical resources to do the actual work. Two people we hired recently aren't even officially billing to the project code because the account manager doesn't want to cut into revenue for the project.
One of the work streams I took over when the lead project manager quit 2 months ago has had poor vendor management that I only realize recently. They released their final build of their product and it's so buggy we can't even recommend the customer install, test, and use it.
I spoke with my old boss two nights ago. Best boss I have worked for. He told me this story that will add some additional context.
He and his peer both quit at the same time and we're also hired together to build the original team. My old boss got promoted and asked for his peer and friend to get promoted as well. He was told there was only one slot for promotion and the other guy had to wait a year. Are year came and went with no movement.
My boss had a personal commitment that he had planned for months. He was supporting a sales pursuit when the client asked for an in-person presentation on it with just over a week's notice. My boss said no, coordinated a backup, and then started getting a ton of pressure from leadership to attend the in-person meeting that conflicted with his personal commitment. The department head called him up and said he had his friend's promotion papers on his desk and would push them through if he went on this trip. You know where this is going that promotion never materialized. They both quit 2 months later. This makes me very distrustful about any promises leadership makes which at this point they're not even making promises.
How screwed am I? is there a recovery model for this project or a situation like this?