Reply to: Death March projects

[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.

[willendure]

Also not renewing. 6 weeks to go!!

Unfortunately I got turned down for the perm job with a US tech company. But I feel inspired that I got through 3 interview rounds. I think they would have taken me, but I stupidly scheduled the last interview for friday afternoon and was brain dead after a long week on the death march, so made a less than stellar impression.

Never mind, there is always something else, some way forward, and it could only be as bad as this worst case so nothing to lose by getting the hell out of Dodge.

[Dorkeaux]

I'm currently on a contract that could be described as a death march.
Sadly, in our profession these are far too common.
I remember describing one to my father, an actual engineer. He was horrified at our tolerance for project failure, the antithesis of engineering.

I probably won't be renewing it. But the idea of a contractor "torpedoing" a client's project or otherwise acting against their interests is self-destructive and deeply unprofessional.

There might be some green shoots that come out of this. Perhaps three areas not directly related to the project that could be their own initiatives. I'll pitch it to the client when the dust settles.

[willendure]

PM just booked a meeting every day for 30 minutes for the foreseeable future - time to squeeze those pips! Actually there are a few I will quite enjoy seeing squeezed. Death March to the finishing line!

[willendure]

Depends where you sit in the project I guess. Been on a couple of these but being on the Service Ops side they turned out to be a bit of an easy gig up to the point it was forced in to live without being properly ready and I had to do some work. If you are on the hook for delivery or working closely with the Indian teams then yeah, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near that. For me they were possibly the least rewarding gigs I've done but with the right mentality and out of the stress zone they can be OK.

I'm in the thick of it and have been the last 5 months. But I don't give a toss any more because I am leaving when my contract is up. So in that sense I can find it funny. They were all arguing in a call today and it was doing my head in, so I just turned the vol down. It is funny to watch all the careful manouvering going on to make sure arses are covered, blame is deflected, bare faced lies are told and believed.

There was a pad of sticky notes on my desk and I numbered them in a countdown for the remaining weeks. Now each monday I tear one off and chuck it in the bin. Can't wait.

[willendure]

Probably a large contributor to why the contract/job marker is so bad at the moment. I suspect project sponsors have got sick of throwing money at projects that never seem to deliver anything and are trying outsourcing.

They'll be sick of throwing money at outsourcing to a bunch of muppets soon enough!

I work over several projects at the moment. The other project was done by a mostly UK team, mix of contractors and permies, and has more experienced members of the business involved. They got me to do a piece of their design - the requirements were given to me in plenty of time, I got enough time to complete my design and refine it with the devs and testers until we were all happy with it, they have plenty of time to do their work - its all going well basically. That is money well spent.

The cheapo offshore team is cheap, but still a waste of money. Will be a waste of money in lost business too.

[SussexSeagull]

Brings back memories of working on projects where you turn up on day one then leave several months later and the project hasn't actually advanced at all that you can tell. Or my last but one contract where they started getting rid of Test Contractors despite the fact it was several years late and most of them had only been there for a fraction of that time.

Probably a large contributor to why the contract/job marker is so bad at the moment. I suspect project sponsors have got sick of throwing money at projects that never seem to deliver anything and are trying outsourcing.

Which is another conversation.

[northernladuk]

Depends where you sit in the project I guess. Been on a couple of these but being on the Service Ops side they turned out to be a bit of an easy gig up to the point it was forced in to live without being properly ready and I had to do some work. If you are on the hook for delivery or working closely with the Indian teams then yeah, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near that. For me they were possibly the least rewarding gigs I've done but with the right mentality and out of the stress zone they can be OK.

[willendure]

The latest: The Indian devs have decided to re-invent the wheel and implement stuff they should not even touch that AWS gives them for free. I told them bad idea, just get on with your application logic and they were blah blah blah blah blah... Meanwhile PM is still trying to iron out the spec for some pretty simple stuff that should have been agreed a couple of months ago.

Its all quite amusing when you know you are leaving soon!