Reply to: Death March projects

[TheDude]

I joined a project for a large US firm. The plan was to replace all of it's huge data silos with a huge data lake.

So far, so good.

They also wanted to add a frontend so that legacy SQL developers could write queries that would be transformed into Apache Spark jobs. The plan being retain business knowledge whilst allowing legacy devs to be productive on a distributed computing platform.

Not do good. Spark has a very different execution model to Oracle, Sybase etc. Simply porting legacy stored procs is a recipe for disaster however this wasn't a fatal flaw - with some training users could write efficient jobs even though such training negated one of primary benefits of the new ssystem.

The absulte killer was the front end required users to manually link the 'functions' they had written. Modify a function and every job that uses it has to be manually re-linked. A one line change to a function could literally require days of manual re-linking.

The thing is that the person that proposed the system was regarded as an untouchable super genius and he had the buy in of several influential managers.

I explained all of these issues in great detail, provided calculations that even automating the re-linking task involved traversing huge dependency graphs and would still be slow. I also proposed a package based dependency solution that would eliminate linking.

Of course I was ignored but I was also absolutely correct and the project was canned six months later at a cost of tens of millions. No one lost their job and the super genius responsible left for a better job soon after.

It taught me that after a point you have to stop caring and just take the money. I also got loads of cool trips to the US out of it so it was still a win for me.

[BlueSharp]

The penny is dropping that I was not talking out of my rear (for a change).

The business processes I warned them about being not fit for purpose are turning out to be, well not fit for purpose. Either way the team is delivering again, even if the business process is not working. But the work at risk was signed off, so arse is covered.

But in the great contractor scheme of things thats not my problem.

41 days to go.

[willendure]

I hope you argued the case that's the PM's responsibility, and he failed to get additional resources to recover the project slipage.

I actually made my case 2 months ago because I could see where things were headed. This time around I just nodded and smiled - 4 weeks to go!

[willendure]

The funniest thing I've seen this year is a PM who off shored work to India to support a team in the UK. Doing daily video standups, helping with testing etc. Everything was going ok, until they found out the PM was actually the CEO of the company they were out sourcing to in India. He got fired and they stopped using his company.

This happened on a major Scottish Government project - Indian manager working in the project as some kind of PM used his contracting Ltd to bring in a load of them on T2 visas, all working through his company and he was taking a big cut too. He actually made millions out of it.

[BlueSharp]

Got the serious pep talk from the PM today. Things we cannot afford to let slip. Says the man who let the whole thing slip for about 2 months landing us all in the this pile of tulip. Genius.

I hope you argued the case that's the PM's responsibility, and he failed to get additional resources to recover the project slipage.

[BlueSharp]

The funniest thing I've seen this year is a PM who off shored work to India to support a team in the UK. Doing daily video standups, helping with testing etc. Everything was going ok, until they found out the PM was actually the CEO of the company they were out sourcing to in India. He got fired and they stopped using his company.

That is an outstanding lack of oversight from senior leadership.

[krytonsheep]

The funniest thing I've seen this year is a PM who off shored work to India to support a team in the UK. Doing daily video standups, helping with testing etc. Everything was going ok, until they found out the PM was actually the CEO of the company they were out sourcing to in India. He got fired and they stopped using his company.

[willendure]

Got the serious pep talk from the PM today. Things we cannot afford to let slip. Says the man who let the whole thing slip for about 2 months landing us all in the this pile of tulip. Genius.

[willendure]

Developers started work about a month ago without a proper spec - the idea of "agile" was floated as an excuse for this lack of preparation.

Today, the message finally got through to project management that the various pieces of the project do not align. There are fundamental misconceptions between the various sides that we are integrating on how they identify things, and at what level. What the person who failed to write the spec had assumed was going to be a simple first implementation has turned out to be a complete mess. Crawling through it all now on various calls, accross multiple language barriers to try and make sense of things that really needed to be made sense of about 2 months ago.

If it had somehow gelled together without much thought I could actually see us making the delivery deadline. No chance now!

[willendure]

This just gets crazier.

So I heard rumours that Client Co has already done this integration project previously in some form. Given current difficulties I asked about it as there might be some useful info there. I found references to an older decommissioned project. Turns out Client Co has done this project before. Badly. Kinda failed on it. So this is actually Death March II - The Repeat. Archeology has uncovered the site of the battle of Death March I - The Defeat.




Everybody getting quite narky today. They threw one guy under a bus and gave him a hard time.

[willendure]

Its ok, apparently its an agile project now, so we just make the requirements up as we go!!!

I was very amused by the fact that people think switching to an agile project is some kind of short cut to delivery! All agile really does is break the process of requirements -> dev -> test down into smaller pieces, to give a project finer grained steerability. But that comes at the cost of needing a well run process around it, to ensure the requirements are gathered and discussed with end clients, backlog is refined to the necessary standard, and so on. This is a case of, we f'cked up the requirements and design phases and dumped the whole turd onto the developers, lets just call it agile, since we have no clue and agile seems like a suitable label to hide this mess behind!

[willendure]

Latest: Now the testers are inventing new requirements on the fly, probably an ass covering manouvre, but not what you need when you are trying to push you ball of tulip over the line!

Its ok, apparently its an agile project now, so we just make the requirements up as we go!!!

[willendure]

Started talking about Nazis to the HR guy. Don't know what I was thinking.
I was wrong-footed by the complete difference in focus between permie and contract interviews.

For some reason this makes me think of Spud in train spotting having his job interview on speed and just raving on like a loon!

I was also a little wrong-footed which is annoying because what I could really have done with is a few practice interviews to get the hang of it. Had plenty good answers worked out AFTER the interview. I kept giving examples from the current death march project because that was all that was left in my brain by Friday afternoon, and that probably came accross quite negatively. I have so much positive experience I could have drawn on! Oh well.

Latest: Now the testers are inventing new requirements on the fly, probably an ass covering manouvre, but not what you need when you are trying to push you ball of tulip over the line!

[Ketto]

Started talking about Nazis to the HR guy. Don't know what I was thinking.

This made me laugh out loud in public. If that’s any consolation!

[Dorkeaux]

Respect for applying for permie jobs.
I couldn't do it.

I've only been on one permie interview in the last couple decades, and I blew it very badly.
Started talking about Nazis to the HR guy. Don't know what I was thinking.
I was wrong-footed by the complete difference in focus between permie and contract interviews.

For example, I was once brought in as an interim head of department (CEO minus 2!) as a contractor with minimum fuss.
The interview for my permie replacement was painful, complex and very, very time-consuming. Same role!

As a contractor no one has ever asked my what school I went to.