Just came from a section meeting where I found out where the credenzas from yesterday ended up - a couple of guys had just been relocated into an open-plan area with no storage space, so one of them siezed the credenzas.
Now he's being told he has to give them up, because even though no-one else seems to want them, whoever ordered them in the first place didn't order them for him.
21 July, 2005
20 July, 2005
And again
More delivery men turn up.
"This the Project Office?"
We look around the interior of our shed. "Kind of."
"You expecting a photocopier?"
More looks exchanged. "Uh... yeah?"
"Cool. We'll bring it in."
"This the Project Office?"
We look around the interior of our shed. "Kind of."
"You expecting a photocopier?"
More looks exchanged. "Uh... yeah?"
"Cool. We'll bring it in."
More furniture wars
There's now a credenza bonanza, with the Haves trying desperately to offload them onto the Have Nots.
PMv2 is weeping hysterically in his corner.
PMv2 is weeping hysterically in his corner.
18 July, 2005
Enthusiasm
The project manager takes his leave for the afternoon, citing having to go into the main buidling "for some strategic planning. For the project office."
As he wanders out the door, the words "Waste of bloody time..." drift in on the breeze.
As he wanders out the door, the words "Waste of bloody time..." drift in on the breeze.
12 July, 2005
Addendum to last item.
And now there's a sudden flurry of e-mails as the project manager goes through his Inbox and begins assigning tasks that he's decided are now operational rather than project issues.
Bastard.
Bastard.
Project Death Spiral latest
PMv2 has just announced via e-mail (which I'm sure he timed so it would be sent after he'd left The Shed) that my minion and I "will be taking the lead on this project and as consequence will be responsible for the interface with the business". In other words, he's decided we're going to go straight from project status to operational status without actually finishing the project.
This seems to be the Project Office's response to concerns at the problems Death Spiral has been experiencing. By announcing that everything's ready (at least as far as they're concerned) they don't need to deal with things like it being incorrectly scoped or managed for most of its duration, and anything that goes wrong from this point on is an operational issue and not their problem.
Neither welcome, nor surprising..
This seems to be the Project Office's response to concerns at the problems Death Spiral has been experiencing. By announcing that everything's ready (at least as far as they're concerned) they don't need to deal with things like it being incorrectly scoped or managed for most of its duration, and anything that goes wrong from this point on is an operational issue and not their problem.
Neither welcome, nor surprising..
08 July, 2005
Definite Cow-orker Potential
My minion is on the phone telling someone about having a cyst removed last week. Rather than sticking to a broad, workplace-friendly overview, the conversation so far has expaned to include "urethra", "bowels" and other associated words.
Not that I'm particularly squeamish, but there are things about my workmates internal organs that I don't need to know...
Not that I'm particularly squeamish, but there are things about my workmates internal organs that I don't need to know...
06 July, 2005
01 July, 2005
Disasters 'R Us
After some particularly nasty storms a couple of years ago, the City Council announced the construction of a Disaster Co-ordination Centre in order to deal with future emergencies. This was due for completion at the end of last year.
There were a couple of basic flaws in the plan to begin with - one was that the centre, designed to be manned by two dozen phone and computer operators during emergencies, was only going to use volunteers. That by itself raises a few problems (what if no volunteers show up, access to secured systems/facilities, etc), but the real fun began once the Engineering division got into the act.
They looked at their million-dollar budget, went "Woo-hoo!" and began designing a building without worrying about any of the piddly little details such as infrastructure, communications, planning, and so on. Ninety percent of the budget later (and six months past the completion date), the result is a functionally complete but operationally useless building. When it was pointed out to Engineering that there needed to be some money left to provide something more than just a building, they compromised by offering to tell whoever submitted a tender that they needed to bring the price in a couple of hundred thousand dollars lower. Expect a quality construction project.
The centre was conceived as having direct lines of communciation with emergency services on dedicated landlines. But then money started getting tight, and they fell back on Plan B - a microwave link. The problem with that was that the Disaster Centre site had no useful line-of-sight anywhere, and negotiations were carried out with a developer to allow Council to install a microwave dish on top of a building the developer was seeking approval for. The developer agreed, everyone was happy ... and then the Cuty Council approved construction of an even taller building between the Disaster Centre and the building with the microwave dish. Presumably negotiations with this second developer haven't been carried out in quite the same spirit of cooperation, as Council is now trying to ask a local hospital very nicely if they can install, free of charge, a microwave dish on the hospital roof.
Presumably this is a precursor to approving another high-rise between the Disaster Centre and the hospital.
In the latest development, Council has "found" another half-million dollars in its budget to get the Centre back on track (Engineeering: "Woo-hoo!"), although tentative queries to infrastructure vendors have been met with "That won't even cover the cost of the materials we'll need".
So, to summarise, the plan to date is for a hollow shell of a building manned by volunteers, with no means of communication with the outside world.
"But wait!" as they say in the classics, "that's not all!"
The Disaster Centre has no UPS installed because it would cost money, and because "we already have a generator". During yesterday's flooding, they lost power and the generator failed. The solution was going to be to hire another generator, but the roads being cut by floodwaters put something of a crimp in that plan.
And back here, the project office enjoys a luxurious space on the top floor of the main building. Their ceiling leaked like a sieve, and one desk in particular suffered a steady stream of water that soaked the PC and drowned the paperwork.
The desk belonged to the project manager for the Disaster Centre.
There were a couple of basic flaws in the plan to begin with - one was that the centre, designed to be manned by two dozen phone and computer operators during emergencies, was only going to use volunteers. That by itself raises a few problems (what if no volunteers show up, access to secured systems/facilities, etc), but the real fun began once the Engineering division got into the act.
They looked at their million-dollar budget, went "Woo-hoo!" and began designing a building without worrying about any of the piddly little details such as infrastructure, communications, planning, and so on. Ninety percent of the budget later (and six months past the completion date), the result is a functionally complete but operationally useless building. When it was pointed out to Engineering that there needed to be some money left to provide something more than just a building, they compromised by offering to tell whoever submitted a tender that they needed to bring the price in a couple of hundred thousand dollars lower. Expect a quality construction project.
The centre was conceived as having direct lines of communciation with emergency services on dedicated landlines. But then money started getting tight, and they fell back on Plan B - a microwave link. The problem with that was that the Disaster Centre site had no useful line-of-sight anywhere, and negotiations were carried out with a developer to allow Council to install a microwave dish on top of a building the developer was seeking approval for. The developer agreed, everyone was happy ... and then the Cuty Council approved construction of an even taller building between the Disaster Centre and the building with the microwave dish. Presumably negotiations with this second developer haven't been carried out in quite the same spirit of cooperation, as Council is now trying to ask a local hospital very nicely if they can install, free of charge, a microwave dish on the hospital roof.
Presumably this is a precursor to approving another high-rise between the Disaster Centre and the hospital.
In the latest development, Council has "found" another half-million dollars in its budget to get the Centre back on track (Engineeering: "Woo-hoo!"), although tentative queries to infrastructure vendors have been met with "That won't even cover the cost of the materials we'll need".
So, to summarise, the plan to date is for a hollow shell of a building manned by volunteers, with no means of communication with the outside world.
"But wait!" as they say in the classics, "that's not all!"
The Disaster Centre has no UPS installed because it would cost money, and because "we already have a generator". During yesterday's flooding, they lost power and the generator failed. The solution was going to be to hire another generator, but the roads being cut by floodwaters put something of a crimp in that plan.
And back here, the project office enjoys a luxurious space on the top floor of the main building. Their ceiling leaked like a sieve, and one desk in particular suffered a steady stream of water that soaked the PC and drowned the paperwork.
The desk belonged to the project manager for the Disaster Centre.
Retards.
I never realised until now just how easy it is to "accidentally" insult someone with a simple slip when typing with your off-hand.
"Retards." instead of "Regards,".
Heh.
"Retards." instead of "Regards,".
Heh.
Wet Wet Wet
The torrential rain that flooded most of this region yesterday has gone, but there's still a god-awful amount of water around the place. Including indoors. Corridors in the main building are decorated with bins, buckets and large wet patches on the carpet every couple of metres (with several sodden, collapsed ceiling panels lying arounf for good measure), and while it looks like while The Shed's roof held up, the walls leaked like a Cow-orker on a phone call.
Water seeped into the walls, ran down and then oozed through the carpet across the floor. The carpet around my desk is actually squelching underfoot, and I'm expecting a bumper crop of carpet mold over the next couple of days.
"Nice shag. Interesting colours."
"That's no shag."
Water seeped into the walls, ran down and then oozed through the carpet across the floor. The carpet around my desk is actually squelching underfoot, and I'm expecting a bumper crop of carpet mold over the next couple of days.
"Nice shag. Interesting colours."
"That's no shag."
29 June, 2005
No animals were harmed.
The staff canteen here has a choice of two kinds of pie - "meat" or "flavoured". The implications are disturbing no matter how you turn this around
Status Report
A Project Manager here doesn't actually manage the project. Instead they demand high-level status reports ("Don't tell me the details!") and insist on extra meetings when the schedule slips (which means preparing more reports, for which they don't want to hear the details).
The Project Team Leader is the poor unfortunate who gets to deal with the actual running of the project - managing resources, scope, activities etc. But because they're not officially called a Project Manager they're not allowed to talk to stakeholders without going through the Project Manager, who is supposed to act as the communication channel between the project and its stakeholders. I'm not allowed to be a project manager because I'm not part of the Project Management Office, but because I'm the one who'll be carrying on many of these tasks after the project ends, the Project Office hasn't quite worked out whether I'm allowed to talk to people or not.
What we have at the moment is an interim Project Manager, in place of the original PM who's had to concentrate on other work at the moment (while still acting as a kind of supervising PM). The interim PM is a contractor between projects - he was brought in to manage the creation of the disaster coordination centre, but came on after most of the budget had already been spent on a building with no IT infrastructure (apparently they didn't see the need for a project plan and simply ran amuck on construction until they ran out of cash. So the disaster part of that project seems to be working out okay). The interim PM is with us for another three weeks, I think, at which point we either get another PM, the original one comes back, or ... well, I don't know, really. I don't think anyone else does, either, at this point.
Because no new team leader has been appointed since the last one resigned, the interim PM and I have split the team leader responsibilities. I'm looking after day-to-day activities and am the nominal supervisor of the three temporary and one permanent staff member assigned to the project. The interim PM looks after the higher-level stuff and, because he's an official project manager, he's also allowed to talk to people outside of the project. In fact he more or less has to deal with the high-level stuff, because he has no background whatsoever in this field. And I'm still learning how this place operates.
It's a little bit like the blind leading the blind at times - I'm hoping we'll reach a one-eyed-man/Kingdom of the Blind equilibrium sometime soon, though. All we need to do is find the one-eyed man.
The Project Team Leader is the poor unfortunate who gets to deal with the actual running of the project - managing resources, scope, activities etc. But because they're not officially called a Project Manager they're not allowed to talk to stakeholders without going through the Project Manager, who is supposed to act as the communication channel between the project and its stakeholders. I'm not allowed to be a project manager because I'm not part of the Project Management Office, but because I'm the one who'll be carrying on many of these tasks after the project ends, the Project Office hasn't quite worked out whether I'm allowed to talk to people or not.
What we have at the moment is an interim Project Manager, in place of the original PM who's had to concentrate on other work at the moment (while still acting as a kind of supervising PM). The interim PM is a contractor between projects - he was brought in to manage the creation of the disaster coordination centre, but came on after most of the budget had already been spent on a building with no IT infrastructure (apparently they didn't see the need for a project plan and simply ran amuck on construction until they ran out of cash. So the disaster part of that project seems to be working out okay). The interim PM is with us for another three weeks, I think, at which point we either get another PM, the original one comes back, or ... well, I don't know, really. I don't think anyone else does, either, at this point.
Because no new team leader has been appointed since the last one resigned, the interim PM and I have split the team leader responsibilities. I'm looking after day-to-day activities and am the nominal supervisor of the three temporary and one permanent staff member assigned to the project. The interim PM looks after the higher-level stuff and, because he's an official project manager, he's also allowed to talk to people outside of the project. In fact he more or less has to deal with the high-level stuff, because he has no background whatsoever in this field. And I'm still learning how this place operates.
It's a little bit like the blind leading the blind at times - I'm hoping we'll reach a one-eyed-man/Kingdom of the Blind equilibrium sometime soon, though. All we need to do is find the one-eyed man.
28 June, 2005
Project Death Spiral: Attack of The Hutches
Yesterday morning the rest of the desks arrived for The Shed. We're not entirely sure why we need so many desks in here - current thought is divided between the Infinite Monkeys Theory, and the Project Office simply making sure they spend all their money before the end of the financial year. I suspect the latter, if only because the Infinite Monkeys scenario is too elegant a solution.
The original layout would have given a Workplace Health & Safety person a fit, with a little less than two feet of clearance in which to move between desks. Then again there's a lot of things about the The Shed that would do that. Like the fact that it's a deathtrap in the event of a fire, for instance.
We thought that was the end of it when we all went home yesterday. This morning we came in and discovered the Hutch Fairy had paid a visit overnight, arbitrarily gifting six lucky people with hutches to go on the desks. One of the desks has no-one sitting at it, another is only used intermittently, and the remaining four were given to a random selection of staff members. Other desks were ignored entirely. I have no hutch, for instance, although I've received several offers of one throughout the day.
The place looks even more like a mini-labyrinth than before, with the PMv2 now hidden from the world behind his hutch, and the remainder of The Shed's occupants now invisible from the doorway. PMv1 has been getting progressively more claustrophobic as the day's worn on (partly because he's protesting about the hutches by piling junk on top of his), but we've been ordered to leave the hutches alone and not try to move them elsewhere. The Project Office paid for these hutches, and we're damn well going to appreciate them.
Besides, we're told, the hutches are part of The Plan, and The Plan cannot be changed.
I fear the Project Office's plan.
The original layout would have given a Workplace Health & Safety person a fit, with a little less than two feet of clearance in which to move between desks. Then again there's a lot of things about the The Shed that would do that. Like the fact that it's a deathtrap in the event of a fire, for instance.
We thought that was the end of it when we all went home yesterday. This morning we came in and discovered the Hutch Fairy had paid a visit overnight, arbitrarily gifting six lucky people with hutches to go on the desks. One of the desks has no-one sitting at it, another is only used intermittently, and the remaining four were given to a random selection of staff members. Other desks were ignored entirely. I have no hutch, for instance, although I've received several offers of one throughout the day.
The place looks even more like a mini-labyrinth than before, with the PMv2 now hidden from the world behind his hutch, and the remainder of The Shed's occupants now invisible from the doorway. PMv1 has been getting progressively more claustrophobic as the day's worn on (partly because he's protesting about the hutches by piling junk on top of his), but we've been ordered to leave the hutches alone and not try to move them elsewhere. The Project Office paid for these hutches, and we're damn well going to appreciate them.
Besides, we're told, the hutches are part of The Plan, and The Plan cannot be changed.
I fear the Project Office's plan.
27 June, 2005
Project Death Spiral
There's a meeting this afternoon for the eight-member Project Death Spiral Steering Committee. I see we're booked into a room with seating capacity for six, three of whom will be delivering reports.
It's been a while since I've seen such blatant Applied Cynicism.
It's been a while since I've seen such blatant Applied Cynicism.
22 June, 2005
And the three temps have pointed out that their contracts expire today... The team leader had been trying to get them extended for another 12 weeks, but no-one from the Project Office would confirm for him whether this was going to happen or not.
The Shed could be a very quiet place in the very near future...
The Shed could be a very quiet place in the very near future...
The lesser of two weevils
I've been asked what's worse: the Cow-orker, or Project Death Spiral.
And I think I have to answer: Project Death Spiral.
I know, I know, it sounds difficult to believe. But the only saving grace I can see for the project is that it's short-term (although not as short-term as it was apparently predicted to be). But while the Cow-orker seemed to have the capacity to go on forever, she wasn't as actively malicious, vindictive or unethical in the way that the project culture here seems to be.
t's possible that pain has dulled the pain somewhat - it has been several months since I had to work with her full-time in close proximity. But most of the time she really was just in a state of berserker stupidity and had no real sense of what she was doing to the people around her.
Kind of like having Godzilla in the next cubicle.
And I think I have to answer: Project Death Spiral.
I know, I know, it sounds difficult to believe. But the only saving grace I can see for the project is that it's short-term (although not as short-term as it was apparently predicted to be). But while the Cow-orker seemed to have the capacity to go on forever, she wasn't as actively malicious, vindictive or unethical in the way that the project culture here seems to be.
t's possible that pain has dulled the pain somewhat - it has been several months since I had to work with her full-time in close proximity. But most of the time she really was just in a state of berserker stupidity and had no real sense of what she was doing to the people around her.
Kind of like having Godzilla in the next cubicle.
21 June, 2005
Gah.
Well, that was really unpleasant... Just attended another bloody meeting with the past and present project managers (PMv1 and PMv2, for future references) and it seemed like every second comment on the status of the project was aimed at the departed team leader to affirm his evil and disruptive influence on the project.
Who could have known that the first six months of the project when most of the schedule slippage occurred was really such a golden age of achievement and direction? Maybe this is one of the hidden perks of being full-time staff (like the first team leader) rather than a contractor (like the second).
On the plus side, this seems to imply there's a realistic chance I can make a complete mess of things and get away with it as long as I smile nicely at people while I'm at it.
Who could have known that the first six months of the project when most of the schedule slippage occurred was really such a golden age of achievement and direction? Maybe this is one of the hidden perks of being full-time staff (like the first team leader) rather than a contractor (like the second).
On the plus side, this seems to imply there's a realistic chance I can make a complete mess of things and get away with it as long as I smile nicely at people while I'm at it.
Project Death Spiral latest
And after the latest round of meetings, I'm now the new team leader for Project Death Spiral.
But no-one's calling me that officially because the project has lost the last two people to hold that title.
And, possibly, because they might then have to pay me more money. As it is, the Project Office are pre-emptively citing the infamous "other duties as required" clause, and arguing that "this is the kind of thing you might be doing when you're job actually starts".
But no-one's calling me that officially because the project has lost the last two people to hold that title.
And, possibly, because they might then have to pay me more money. As it is, the Project Office are pre-emptively citing the infamous "other duties as required" clause, and arguing that "this is the kind of thing you might be doing when you're job actually starts".
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