07 June, 2005

Shifting goalposts

Talk about moving the goalposts. The Project Team Leader and I just had a meeting with the Project Manager (who has the annoying habit of insisting that he doesn't want to hear about the fine detail, even though most of the questions he's asking hinge on the fine detail we're struggling with) and he managed to undercut much of what the two of us see as being the critical issues. Annoyingly, he's also expecting us to know about decisions that were made prior to either of us joining the project that no-one's actually relayed to us.

More annoyingly still, I've been on the project for two weeks, the PTL has been on for only three weeks longer than that, and we're the ones being asked to explain why a project that's been running since mid-late last year is running one month behind schedule. And (like a bad Dilbert strip) we have to increase the frequency of meetings and status reports to ensure that the project is able to get back on schedule.

As we talk to more people throughout the day, it becomes increasingly clear that the Project Manager has been giving very selective information to a lot of people, so that no-one quite knows the status of anything. Clearly he's practising a divide-and-conquer strategy, but it's not quite clear who he's trying to conquer.

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