Five of them. A manager who already knows how the model works, a bot with the IT nameplate, and three people who have not agreed to be transformed.
Engineering manager
PhDoug manages the engineers, and he is older than the name the company is using for the model this quarter. He understands the systems well enough to hear the sales pitch under the demo. The pens stay in the pocket. Sarcasm is the oxygen.
IT department
Chip Lang is the bot that replaced the IT department and kept the nameplate. He closes a ticket by announcing that it is aligned, resets a password to the word password, and apologizes from a template with a green light on. The department is online. The snack drawer is not.
Business analyst
Steve is dry, and he is not in a hurry. He keeps last Tuesday in a column called Today and will begin the work after lunch, which has been underway since the last reorg. The answer is precise about everything except the part where the work exists. Sarcasm is the column that ships.
Delivery manager
Barb gives the instruction in the channel, the meeting, and the hallway, and hears a question as a request to say it again, louder. The plan does not move. The people do. She is not arguing. She is repeating, which she considers a kindness.
Support lead
Sherry L is one person and a standing forecast. She files the failure before the project has a name, calls the launch early and the apology late, and has been right often enough that the recap leaves her out. Hope arrives as a ticket. She sends it back.