Bad project

Thursday, October 21. 2004

As some of your probably know, I'm currently working on a project for a big multi-national company. Right now, we're in the final phase where we fix the last bugs in the software and prepare for testing. But right now, the overall mood is about to tilt, due to (IMHO) mis-mangement. The project managers failed to give us work in the beginning (it took almost 3 months until we finally had something to do), then during the project it took way too long to get feedback for crucial design decisions like communication protocols, file formats, class diagrams and sequence diagrams. That led to the situation that we had some code in use for over weeks when we got the order to throw it away and redo it. That cost us plenty of time. Yesterday, we finally managed to present what the software is already able to do, and we got feedback for so many things to be changed. And the best thing is that we got the information today that the project doesn't have to be finished in two weeks as promised yesterday but in one week, as the final acceptence is going to be next friday. And they're also talking about working in the weekend. And these time frames are just being chosen arbitrarily, without talking too much with us.

I'm absolutely not interesting in working in the weekend, as I would like to celebrate my birthday instead, nor am I interested to do some extra-stressy work just because of mis-management. IMHO, the people who managed the project totally fucked it up, and should have planned all that better, giving us feedback within a short time, and actually listening to us. We can't work faster than we're able to. And especially testing and squashing out the last few bugs is extremely time-consuming, especially with a huge backlog of change requests in your neck.

If this doesn't come to an end very soon, I think I could get crazy. Probably I will institutionalize myself into a psychiatry within the next few weeks. We'll see...

Posted by admin in Rants at 22:22 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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seems to be a common practic in .at - project leaders and managers have no clue abount managing and planning; they talk big, hold big meetings and all the work relies on the selfmanaging technical crew .. happy birthday by the way

#1 teemu on 2004-10-22 11:36 (Reply)

that's no special .at problem, sounds like a standard software project to me, leaded by the default managing people who are quite unqualified. A very high amount of all software projects are like this. Take a look at the chaos report of the standish group

#2 niko (Homepage) on 2004-10-23 17:13 (Reply)

Same problems in .de - I had to work this weekend because of the same problems like you and - how ironic - yesterday was my birthday, too

#3 oliver on 2004-10-24 21:45 (Reply)

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