Marina remembers the sudden shift in Paula’s thinking. “It was like she suddenly said, ‘Oh, wait a minute. I can greatly influence the day when we work this part of the backlog down to zero by moving people over to this area, and then when it gets to zero, I move them over there. And every time I play around with the spreadsheet and make the allocations better, the dates move forward a bit,’” Marina told me. “I think prior to that, Paula had thought she really had no control over it, except to try to make the numbers look as small as possible.”
