07 September, 2005

Racing the Titanic

One of the contractors is very excited, as she's found another job and starts on Monday. Even more exciting for her, she doesn't have to see Sluggo ever again, as he dropped by this morning to chat and told us that he'll be doing "site inspections" for the next couple of days and will see us for an update meeting next week.

"Site inspections" seem to be what he does when he has enough of working up in the Project Office and runs out of pretexts on which to come down to The Shed. Instead he announces that he's off to inspect one of the sites related to the other two projects he's managing.

(Although he's said recently that one of these has been shelved for the moment, so you'd think that would cut down on the sites he needs to inspect.
And he spent a lot of time inspecting sites last week, too, come to think of it. Funny, too, that these always seem to take place shortly after lunch...)

But anyway, this means that three weeks from now, Death Spiral will be manned by my minion (freshly returned from holidays with no idea of what she's walking into), one contractor of (by then) four weeks' experience, and (possibly) the sole remaining original contractor (now more convinced than ever that she needs to find an escape route). Somewhere in the background our poor business analyst will no doubt be undergoing some esoteric form of torture in the depths of the Project Office for being efficient.

And managing it all will be PMv1, he of the many dodgy initial decisions, staunch advocate of multiple meetings and workshops, and fierce opponent of talking to stakeholders.

At least there's still time to rearrange the deckchairs.

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