Need a new project name

[joflasher]

So I'm on this project and it isn't the Whee,Zoom project, it's another project and it's behind schedule.

Really REALLY behind schedule.

As in, everyone who has been paying attention is running like rats from a sinking ship behind schedule. People are offering up first born children to keep from being put on this project behind schedule. Okay, not the last one, at least not out in the open but you get the picture. Those of us who are on it either owed someone big or got blackmailed or just had too much sympathy and too little self preservation going on.

I'm going to stick with it because the person who asked me to join the team is a really NICE person. I love working with her and a few others on the team and, sadly, insane deadlines are kind'a comforting at this point.

So I've spent a couple weeks requirements wrangling (cause god forbid we know what we're actually doing before the PTB start yelling about deadlines) and now I'm doing software design.

Due to constraints outside of anyone's control, the design is a touchy subject, both politically and from a feasibility standpoint. We're up to three designs now. No one is happy with any of them and none of them are feasible in the time frame given. So the design meetings tend to get a little bit ... tense.

Today, though, I had an hour's worth of really useful design discussion where no one raised their voices or insulted someone's reading abilities or anything. Progress was made. And I feel good about that.

The really scary thing, though? Although we're massively late and never going to make our deadlines, the project doesn't officially start until next week. That's right, peeps, we aren't even officially on the books yet and we're already late. Years late, by my calculations.

Comments

[mh75.livejournal.com]

Due to constraints outside of anyone's control, the design is a touchy subject, both politically and from a feasibility standpoint.

sounds normal.

The really scary thing, though? Although we're massively late and never going to make our deadlines, the project doesn't officially start until next week. That's right, peeps, we aren't even officially on the books yet and we're already late. Years late, by my calculations.

That, too.

[flasher.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there is a business management thesis in there somewhere ...

[tg2k.livejournal.com]

I have heard this sort of thing before (projects that are quite a bit late before they began), though at my company, the blessing has been that there isn't much in the way of yelling, insults, blame, etc., going on, and the pressure is usually low enough to focus on doing something reasonably appropriate.

Of course, we're not working on things that require the same kinds of brains as you are, either, just good maintainable software design with a smaller set of math/graphics geeks for the medical imaging side of things.

In the end though, most of the time we tried to rush something out on a precise schedule, we simply failed and it went out late, so that the product was safe enough to ship. The problem seems to be that managers would hope to control time and features, and quality would slip. Developers would bring up quality then by letting the features slip. And then it would ship, and we'd define another milestone to bring in additional features and fix bugs that weren't too high priority to prevent the current milestone. This probably sounds familiar to most people in the software industry.

I haven't heard too many cases of people running away from projects at my company, but I guess it does happen.

[mh75.livejournal.com]

The combination of politics and bureaucracy is a particularly poor one.

[flasher.livejournal.com]

Really, the required amount of brains isn't that huge a lot of the time. While I'd like to say it isn't rocket science, sadly it often is and that's just scary. Maintainable software design is a stretch goal for these sorts of projects.

[talldean.livejournal.com]

"Maintainable software" is the holy grail. I keep trying to pitch that to sales, but sales is driven by short-term sales commissions, not by the minimization of long-term costs. Which is the gist of the problem when I run into it, at least.

[flasher.livejournal.com]

These guys just don't want to think ahead. We're building to a hardware platform that won't be available in 5 years, yet the system is supposed to last for 20+. Ask them if they are stock piling said hardware or at least have some sort of transition plan in the works to move to a newer platform and you just get blank looks. Ah, well, I guess it's job security. Someone is going to have to move it all over in 6 years.

[talldean.livejournal.com]

I just want to work somewhere that has two things:
1. Work/life balance
2. Competence at what it does

I rarely see #2, and when I do, #1 is waaaay out the window.

[rsbdeadman.livejournal.com]

If you have a cost-plus contract for this work, then this is your sales people doing good work. It'll be late! And take too many people! And you'll still get paid! Woo-hoo!

If you have customers who don't buy your phones anymore or support them with co-marketing campaigns when you pull this kind of crap too often, then you are in trouble. I am not talking about anyone in particular here.