“RJ,” said Willy, the CEO, putting his arm around RJ’s shoulders, “we made you CTO because you said you could deliver. Foofle have launched a cloud product and it looks like we’ll lose our market share to them. We can’t wait a year, what’s the earliest we can launch Project Synergy? Change the team if they can’t deliver!” Richard Jones (known as RJ to everyone except his mum) went back to his office to think about the situation. Willy was right; he was promoted because he promised to deliver Project Synergy within a year. Unfortunately, things weren’t going well. He had skilled engineers and he’d planned everything thoroughly but things weren’t working out. His DBA, Donald, had broken his leg snowboarding and couldn’t produce Synergy’s schemas, tables and queries. The middle-tier team were working on defects while waiting for Donald to recover. The UI team were finished with Synergy and had moved on but their team lead was worried about rework. He wouldn’t stay CTO for long at this rat