As an analyst, I've worked on my fair share of projects that have never seen the light of day, and essentially just ended up in a black hole.
A scenario like that typically goes like this:
- Client orders an analysis of something. They want all corners covered, and because they'll use it as evidence/argument/pitch or whatever, you're likely working on a tight deadline.
- You (and others) work tirelessly through the nights, pour hundreds of hours into the analysis, do get it finished before deadline. Everything needs to be perfect and bullet-proof.
- Client is presented with the delivery, skims through it, and thanks you for the work.
- The client changes their mind / abandons it all-together.
Those projects rarely feel rewarding, as you're mostly just fighting the clock, and doing lots of boring routine work. And when it turns out that you and your team are the only ones that will ever read the analysis, that kind of just makes it feel useless.
As a manager, when this happens I tell my staff that the sleeping firefighter performs valuable work.
Sometimes management decides it’s worth it to spend staff time on something even though there’s a non-zero probability it will never be used. If there’s no fire during the firefighter’s shift, we don’t conclude her time was wasted and that we should never have had the firefighter.
I once spent months working on an expert witness report for a high profile tech industry trial--one of 10 or so written for "our" side. Never got used because of some things that happened in the course of the lawsuit.
It was a nice change of pace, paid well, and was able to reuse snippets of material here and there over the years, so not totally useless but never got used for its intended purpose.
Of course, I've also been on projects that were just canceled.
A scenario like that typically goes like this:
- Client orders an analysis of something. They want all corners covered, and because they'll use it as evidence/argument/pitch or whatever, you're likely working on a tight deadline.
- You (and others) work tirelessly through the nights, pour hundreds of hours into the analysis, do get it finished before deadline. Everything needs to be perfect and bullet-proof.
- Client is presented with the delivery, skims through it, and thanks you for the work.
- The client changes their mind / abandons it all-together.
Those projects rarely feel rewarding, as you're mostly just fighting the clock, and doing lots of boring routine work. And when it turns out that you and your team are the only ones that will ever read the analysis, that kind of just makes it feel useless.