"It's a good class except for one thing," says fish. "I'm there with a co-worker and my boss and his boss. And my boss's boss can't follow directions."

So when he's told to work up a brief project statement for a hypothetical project that includes project cost and duration, boss's boss comes up with a document twice as long as requested and includes no information about cost or duration. And when he's asked to plan a real project for the company, boss's boss again ignores directions.

"He comes up with a humongous project to put all the company's disparate internal and external applications under the control of a new application server and Web portal -- which would have the side effect of putting most of the company's applications under his own control," says fish.

The team can't begin to measure the time or cost required for this. The instructor has to intervene to switch the team to a project of reasonable scope, cost and duration. Fish and bosses end up staying late to get even a sketchy version of this project together.

To cap things off, fish and bosses are called out of class halfway through the last day of class by boss's boss's boss, the director of IT. The reason? Someone in another department has a project due in two days. They neglected to inform IT till now. Fish and bosses are now working overtime to evaluate two major HR packages that none of them knows anything about.