If you meet the Localization Manager on the road, kill him!

[With apologies to the sage who said, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!"]

Hope I didn't startle you with that title, but it came to me as I asked myself how my clients would deliver localized products if I were hit by a bus, or if someone met me on the road and killed me.

The cemeteries are, as deGaulle mentioned, filled with indispensable people, which means that in time my clients would appoint somebody to pick up in the middle and finish the project. That applies to every one of the employees in every one of my clients' companies. My replacement might even do a better job than I did, such that outside of the improvement (and the sudden drop in total irony in the building), nobody would notice the difference.

I suppose it's a backhanded way of telling myself I do a comprehensive, one-stop-shopping job of localization project management: "Really, now: If I shuffled off the mortal coil, how would you guys get this work done?" The people who create the domestic product are accustomed to leaving all of the thought and toil to me, and they're in a variety of departments, focused squarely on anything but the localization process. Absent the localization manager (who, in this case, has no staff), the process would probably devolve back to those individual departments. Within no time, they would have had enough and begin to clamor for a replacement.

It's not so important to be indispensable as it is to fill in the dozens of unanticipated cracks in the process of turning domestic products into localized ones.

It's also a good idea to keep a wary eye on people you meet on the road.