gingerandjohn.com

I've decided that my company turns to me when they see a death march coming. I must have some kind of an alpha-geek "kick me" sign permanently tattoed on my forehead. In hopes that I can prevent this kind of thing from happening to others (since I appear to be doomed), I present herewith a short list of some of the things that went/are going wrong with my current project.

Names have been changed and removed to protect the guilty.

Lots of responsibility taken, no authority given

• The project manager never managed the project. In fact, although he was on site at least half the time I was, I never saw him during the day for more than 20 minutes (that's total, not per day). In my not-so-humble opinion, it is the responsibility of the project manager to remove obstacles from his team. I sure never saw that.
• Dependencies weren't managed. My boss is absolutely horrible at this. The usual conversation on status goes something like this:
  Boss to me: "So when do you expect Feature X will be done?"
  Me to boss: "I can't finish it until this other stuff, over which I have no control, gets done. After that, it should only take me two days."
  Boss to me: "So when do you expect Feature X will be done?"
  Me to self: "mutter mumble burn down the building grumble"
• Required elements were not in place when we went to the client (especially network infrastructure and data collection migration). So, we got to spend 3 weeks on-site getting the system to point where we could begin our integration.

Customer vision and functional spec (and tests) never lined up.

• Apparently, the client had 8 days to approve the specificiations (not only for our piece, but for the entire system).
• No correction for "I know what I told you, now I know what I really need". "But this is what you approved" really pisses the customer off when they don't think it's usable.

No "burn-in" time

• This system was sold as vaporware. Not necessarily a problem in and of itself, but it resulted in FAT on an alpha system, and SAT on a beta system that had been "running" for less than a week.

No division between technical and business sides

• guaranteed scope creep

Bugzilla was co-opted to be a progress and issue reporting mechanism for customer

• It's a tool for the developers, not for the customers
• Defect tracking isn't effective when you can't add or reopen bugs ("it doesn't look good to the customer")
• We ended up doing writing a spec via bug reports. Not the preferred way to write a spec!

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