Was your bosses name Jim Phelps?
“Jim Phelps”
Lol.
It is amazing what you can accomplish when you get the negative Nellies out of the room.
;-)
Actually we kept them in the room long enough to get a whiteboard full of reasons the project was impossible.
Those were the issues we knew we had to deal with.
Then we kicked them out of the room and brainstormed on how to deal with the issues.
We broke the project into bite sized pieces—assigned sub-teams to those tasks, got volunteers to lead the team and got weekly status reports.
Once a team had solved their problem they would help out any teams that were struggling.
It worked.
After you have done a few “impossible” things you get highly motivated to take on more.
One anecdote about the “impossible” team.
From the whiteboard from the earliest days we had one item that we could not get done.
There was a powerful guy from another department in the organization who vehemently opposed it and had the clout to kill it.
We just left it on the white board....for eight years!
Then he retired.
We reassembled the old team, did all the work needed to implement the change—and then hit the new guy with a big package and asked him to sign it.
He looked it over and said “Ok, looks like you have thought this through. Where do I sign?”
He signed it and implemented it.
Then we told him the really good news. He had a new powerful ally for any future battles he needed to fight.