Thursday 20 November 2014

The rudderless ship

In the middle of last week I was assigned to a new project so, over the past few days, I have dutifully attended calls, listened relatively carefully and made several pages of rather scruffy, but comprehensive, notes. We had already worked out that I had been summoned to perform task a when in fact tasks b and c  were also needed and, in fact, needed to precede task a.

As I asked a few probing questions it became apparent that, although a solution was required, none of the project team had considered it necessary to document the requirements for that solution. I could understand this as, after all, they had only been assembled for several months and the issue that spawned the project raised it's head years ago*!

The absence of a Requirements Architect from the project team was no surprise either so, with four days exposure to the issue, I set about drafting a high level requirements document. I then e-mailed it out, asking for comments and approval. I received a couple of replies and it suddenly became apparent that this project had been running for the best part of a year and no-one had bothered to involve the relevant Service owner.

This was unbe … fucking … lievable! These halfwit, cretins had been attempting to create a new service and had not involved an accountable individual who would take responsibility for the new service. Needless to say there were several tumbleweed moments on today's call when I pointed out this fundamental deficiency with the project. How the hell did they think they could make decisions when none of the group had any accountability. Give me fucking strength!

Feeling that I had definitely earned today's pay, I headed out to the garage and turned these manky, shitty items
 Into these shiny, soon to be painted engine mounting plates
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* This, for any American Readers, is sarcasm

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