Burning down the house

We have no fire alarms in the sheds because the sheds aren't attached to the main building, and therefore there's no legal obigation to let people in the sheds know if there's a fire.

I mention this because we've just received a self-congratulatory e-mail announcing that the City Council has been awarded a "Caring Council" award.

Project Death Spiral meets Monday

Severe pointy-hair attack this morning. Amongst all the organisation-generated spam in my Inbox, I find a message from PMv2 asking me to "provide a detailed table" showing 10 different categories across 12 different items. And it must be presented in a Project Office template, which happens to be portrait size (variation from the PO template will not be tolerated). So ... a 12x10 table no wider than the short edge of an A4 sheet. No problem - provided I use 4pt font. Except I don't think 4pt is approved for use in Project Office documents, so I might have a problem here.

That's only the ludicrous part.

The aggravating part is that this is the third incarnation of this information he's asked for - he's already been provided with everything that's available, but wants it summarised in yet another form. Because diversity is good. Should I pre-empt him and supply it as a pie-chart, too, I wonder? This latest request means that not only have I basically wasted my time drafting those earlier documents, I now have to put on hold half the work I'm doing now because he wants to see the Giant Table of Doom first before anything else goes ahead.

Burn, baby, burn

There was a fire drill today. Not that residents of The Shed were told - there are no alarms here, no fire wardens came to check on us or do a head count to make sure we were out safely, and when it was pointed out that the shed only has one door and all the windows are barred, the official & considered response was that a demountable building intended to contain eleven people was too small to warrant an extra exit.

Presumably this means they feel it would be more trouble to cut a door into the wall than to replace up to a dozen crispy-fried staff.

Workplace conversations

Minion (in stream-of-consciousness mode): "... oooh, itchie booby ..."

Stifled snorts from around the room.

Momentary pause.

Temp: "Well if that's the kind of relationship we're going to have, let me tell you all about my balls..."

Just another snapshot of Life in The Shed.

Project Death Spiral: raw nerves

A fairly serious issue has come up. One of those things that's so glaringly obvious in hindsight that it seems impossible no-one identified it at the time. Particularly the people making the decisions back then, like PMv1 and Project Team Leader v1.

While waiting for a meeting to begin yesterday morning, my minion pounced on PTLv1, who was sitting in for someone else, and asks him whether anyone had identified this issue back when the decision was first made.

"Err... no."

She explains.

"Um, no. That's easily fixed, though. There'll be a workaround. Why is it a problem again?" (Inoffensive guy, but not real bright).

Another manager in attendance asked for a couple of details, and suggested some solutions that could be discussed at another meeting later in the week.

And that, as far as we knew, was that. Until this morning when my minion arrived back in the shed after getting some clean drinking water from inside the main building.

"Did you think I was making a personal attack on PTLv1 yesterday?"

"Hell, no. He was still able to walk unassisted. Why?"

Apparently PTLv1 baled up my minion in passing and asked whether she was trying to make a personal attack on him yesterday (which is something only someone who'd never seen her make a personal attack could ask).

My minion brushes it aside. "No, of course not. I'm just trying to work out why no-one saw this coming before now and thought you might know something from back then."

"Well it felt like you were blaming me. I've heard that people are trying to blame me for the project running so far behind schedule when I was running it." (Well, who'd have thought? Chalk it up to one of life's cruel coincidences, I guess).

"Seriously, I haven't given it a second thought."

"Well I was worrying about it all day. Because it wasn't my fault, you know." Suddenly he sees light at the end of the tunnel. "But you were there, too. You were part of all those decisions!"

At this point he comes dangerously close to incurring a real personal attack, but my minion restrains herself and points out that she wasn't the project team leader, and was only told about things (sometimes) after they happened. PTLv1 is starting to sweat a little by this point ("Oh god, she really is trying to put the blame on me!") so she takes pity on him and explains that all she's really interested in doing is trying to get the issue fixed as soon as possible.

"Oh, that's good. Because it really sounded like you were trying to make a personal attack, and I've heard stuff. People are saying things. And it wasn't my fault. Really. Umm..." Some primitive survival instinct sees him retreat back to his office before he digs himself any deeper.

No guilty consciences there, no. Not in the slightest.

Project Death Spiral

I hesitate to throw the word "retarded" around lightly, but I can't think of any better way to describe the template the Project Office have devised for all project-related documents.

It's an interesting experience to bold one word and watch it carry on throughout the entire document. And the same for indenting, dot-pointing, and probably a number of formatting options I haven't tried yet.

Interesting the first time, frustrating everytime thereafter...

Brother of Death Spiral

Another project is just gearing up, which is tangentially related to Project Death Spiral. As an identified stakeholder (see also "drive-by victim"), I was required in a meeting.

The Evil Danny Devito clone also turns up, having identified himself as a stakeholder. He seems to be a stakeholder in every project going at the moment, possibly because project managers have developed a defensive strategy of pointing him at other projects to spread his attention as thinly as possible.

This time around he spends less time trying to emphasise that everyone else is simply duplicating the work of his project (reality has started to intrude, perhaps), and has done some research on the software under discussion. Unfortunately for him, that's all he's done, without actually trying to understand what the software is going to be used for. He's aware that it's a database of some kind, but doesn't know how it's being and will be used. So he concentrates on what he's ovbiously cribbed from the company's website and tries to sound like an authority.

Evil Devito: "I think we need to be able to run this report from it. I read about it, and it sounds like what we need."

Database developer: "Uh, sure. That's just one of the default reports. We can do that without any dramas."

Evil Devito: "Because it's perfect for what we need. It gives us that big picture overview, so we need to be able to access this."

DB developer: "Okay..."

Meeting chair: "We already have the big picture, Evil Devito. I don't think we need to dwell on being able to run a report that's part of what we're getting out of the box."

Evil Devito: "But once we get it, we can show people! And they'll be impressed! By the way, we have far too many categories in our database." He rattles off some statistics. "That's way too many. We need to delete some - look at this list!"

DB administrator: "Uh, that report you've pulled includes all the subcategories and other fields. You could delete all of them, but then you're database would be an unusable mess."

Sensing he's losing his audience, Evil Devito introduces his other bugbear for the meeting: the "squillions of spreadsheets" that are plaguing the organisation.

Evil Devito: "Squillions, I tell you! We need to get rid of them all by incorporating them all into this database!"

My minion: "Why?"

Evil Devito: "Squillions! All that data, stored in spreadsheets!"

Minion: "What kind of spreadsheets?"

Evil Devito: "What part of 'squillions' aren't you following? They're a plague and we must be rid of them!"

Minion: "Most of them are probably reports people are using to analyse what's in the database. Like we do. If you take away the spreadsheets, people aren't going to be able to do their jobs properly."

Evil Devito: "Spreadsheets must die! The database is the only solution!"

Minion: "Even if we can't manipulate the data that comes out of it?"

Evil Devito twitches, then turns to the person beside him. "Squillions of spreadsheets. Everywhere, I tell you!"

Dammit.

Now there's a credenza back in here again. It must have been part of the same plan that meant we had to have randomly-allocated hutches.

And one more time

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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..

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...

Err... when did I start running Project Death Spiral? And if I'm not running it, why is everyone asking me what to do?

Disasters 'R Us revisited

And on top of everything else, they're going to be using Lotus Notes.

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.

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.

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."