22 September, 2005

Project Death Spiral: Everything you know is wrong. Again.

Late afternoon meeting with PMv1 yesterday, attended by the only two members of the Death Spiral team available (one's sick, one's temporarily fled the country, and the third refused to come in to work today for fear it would cost him his sanity) wherein we were told that everything we've been told about the project scope over the last three months and worked our tasks around is wrong, because Sluggo never had formal, documented approval for any of the changes he was trying to make to the project plan originally laid down by PMv1.

News to us, certainly, and while it wasn't entirely unexpected that didn't make it anymore welcome. I suspect it was also news to PMv1, who'd said nothing about this at any point beforehand and had probably been looking furiously for a way to reinstate his vision for Death Spiral (i.e. the flawed, arse-about vision which deliberately builds in at least one level of unnecessary and inaccurate work requiring an expensive and inaccurate "quick-fix" solution). Fortunately for him, Sluggo appears to have been constitutionally incapable of producing any actual work, or documenting anything remotely useful or relevant, so it's been very easy to dismiss anyything Sluggo said that PMv1 doesn't agree with.

Of course if he'd done this at any point over the last few months when he still had overall control of Death Spiral and knew what Sluggo was up to, this would have saved everyone a lot of grief and misunderstanding, but then he wouldn't have been able to transform Sluggo into the Universal Scapegoat.

Which now leaves the Death Spiral staff with the task of looking back over three months of work and deciding what fits in with PMv1's reborn vision, what has to be reworked entirely, and what's turned out to be just so much wasted effort.

With, as we discovered at the meeting, PMv1 reviewing the results all the while and telling us we still don't understand and are getting it all wrong. Because it's not about what we want, or what the stakeholders want, or even doing things the right way when reality intrudes - it's all about following his plan.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been reading your 'accounts' since about 2003, and PMv1, Sluggo and the crew actually sound worse than the Cow-orker. Quite an achievement, that. You have my sympathy, although, now that you're leaving...
Anyway, thanks for leaving Enter the Cow-Orker site up--I still have many people to direct to it!

Argh said...

They were worse. Unbelievably worse. Friends acted in shocked disbelief when I tried to tell them this.