The Producers: Corporate Edition

For those who haven’t seen The Producers (affiliate link), the premise is two producers who get the idea to oversell shares of a horrible play [hundreds of times over], so that they can make off with the surplus when the play ultimately flops early. Unfortunately, the play is smashing success and the producers are now on the hook for paying out many times the actual profits of the show.

It seems like support resource planning often goes this way–departments budget and sell their services under the assumption of a best case scenario [virtually nothing goes wrong]. Ultimately, the first outage of services begets additional outages of services, and selling that same support resource to 250 people becomes a recipe for disaster.