Airborne

I have to tell you that I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard that the Discovery launch went smoothly. Whenever I talk about my project I have been using disaster metaphors .

Titanic was once my favorite because you could talk about management re-arranging deck chairs, while icy ocean poured into the gaping holes in the hull of the ship..

Then it was Challenger - the doomed space launch where the Managers got everyone focused on Launch and not enough people focused on Stay-in-the-air.

So it was good to think that a project did not necessarily have to be doomed. I was beginning to wonder...

Things are going well at the current hellhole - for me at least. By the way, did I mention that this outfit has not been recognized as one of the 100 best places to work in America? Yah, they barely missed getting on the list - probably because of the physical and emotional abuse which the Managers call "Leadership."
The onus is on the venerable development group to put some lipstick on this pig and try to fool the users with blinking message boxes and quixotic error messages. It will probably work, since the users are dolts of the first order. Otherwise they would have yanked the feeding tube on this pigarama years ago. By the way, remember the old Business School saw about teaching a pig to sing? I heard a new one the other day that resonates: "Do not wrestle with a pig. You will get covered in shit; and the pig Likes it."

How to tell if your Project is FUBAR

Many readers write to the HH mailbag asking how to tell when the project you are working on is FUBAR. We at the Hellhole Center for Project Recognition have done some pretty f-ing amazing research. We looked at some notes we had copied a few years ago and came up with this list.

1. The database is either PeopleSoft or Oracle.

2. The green-card DBA's keep looking at you like you are some senile old bastard who doesn't get database structure.

3. Your Blog begins to hint that the project may be headed for a big granite wall called reality.

4. The users agree with everything you say, but you can tell that they are hiding something important.

5. There is a wine and cheese party scheduled for the week after "go Live".

6. The Project leadership hires a new analyst nine (9) work days before "Go Live" to replace the Analyst nwho started 3 weeks after you and then quit, citing "too much chaos." The replacement was supposed to start this morning, but called in with "car trouble."

7 There were two (false) fire alarms pulled in the building today. (No, it was not me)

8. Micro-Management complains that team members do not escalate issues soon enough. When you raise an issue that seems like a management concern, they call for marathon meetings to assess who knew what and when did they know it. You are eventually scolded for not raising the issue last year - even though you only started 2 months ago.

9. You personally could give a fiddlers fart whether the project succeeds or not. You have no ego-involvement in the outcome. (The weekly paychecks have cleared amiably.) The work is interesting even though the project has as much chance at success as a band of nude gay jugglers in Pakistan.

10. Everyone you need to talk to is on vacation, or too busy to talk to you. You find yourself documenting every elevator conversation and phone call, just in case you need to show how busy you have been.

11. You longingly remember how nice the garden looked before you went back to this dumb job.

Get the succa off the ground

OK. Some of you have guessed it . I have found yet another Hellhole to add to my resume. Sometimes I wonder: are they all hellholes? Is there any successful organization that is run by smart leaders implementing intelligent policies? Is there any enterprise anywhere that is not characterized by the military acronym FUBAR*?
I certainly have not met such a place if there is one.

This time, however, it is different for me. In the old days, when I was an employee, I was what they call invested in the success of my organization. The more invested I was, the more unbearable it was to work for an outfit where the ego-centric bloviation from upper management hung in the air like acrid cordite just after a July 4th fireworks finale.
Nowadays, I just shake my head and think about how glad I am to be getting paid for half of what I would be accomplishing if I was not being micromanaged or being constantly harangued about status.
Today, I was told by said MM that he needed to go to a daily status report on status to some status review committee every morning until go live. Was anything new? I had to chuckle (to myself)
"You had a status meeting yesterday at 4pm."
"Yes, So have you got any updates?"
"Yeah, I had a great bowel movement today, and three cups of coffee."
"Haven't you got something I can tell the committee?"
"Yes, Tell them we are doomed."
"Cut the crap, I need some progress!"
"OK" I gave in and told him what I was working on. Finally he left - looking harried and frightened.

How come there are so few workers and so many management types? They outnumber us. It would not be so bad if they would just leave you alone, and take credit for your work, but they are so out of touch that they would schedule all day meetings to determine if anything is slipping through the cracks. They definitely are not planning to take blame for your failure. They are very good at the CYA game. That is why you are not one of them.
Status meetings are a "must attend" priority. No thought is given to the fact that the thing that is slipping is real work. And it isn't a crack, it is a chasm which was created by management keeping people locked-up in meetings instead of letting them get the work done.

I am reminded of what it must have been like to be on the launch team just before the doomed Challenger space shuttle launch. No one wanted to tell the Launch manager about the O-ring flaw.
Everyone was focused on launch. No one on the launch team had the job of keeping it in the air.