That's another project done.
Last Feb. I got hired to take over a software project in problems. They had "received" a budget and had spent 20% of it without delivering a single thing. No approach, no functional definition, no vision, no principles, no architecture, nothing. They didn't even have a firm statement of scope let alone buy-in or support from the business....bad bad bad.... Worse yet, they had hired a whole team of externals and had them doing stuff all in the wrong order, the software architecture was an unimaginable chaos, the architect had abandoned ship and when I came the project manager's lights had gone out for couple of weeks. (that's why they hired me)
Now *that's* MY kind of mess. I like stuff like this. The bigger the mess, the more I like it.
The only thing that wasn't changing was the deadline. The entire sector was going over on 1-1-2007 regardless of what was happening at my client. During the intake, we spoke about a lot of issues but when we talked about the amount of work to be done and how it had been structured, the project owner was *literally* biting his finger nails....
And no wonder.
So after looking it all over, we took the job with the commitment (addressing the nail biting) that whatever happened we'd be on time, fit for use, and the quality would be good.
But don't talk to me about budget. If the train is derailing and you have to pull hard on two corners of the project triangle, then you still need room to move...
We got agreement on this and away we went.
It wasn't easy. but skipping over a lot of stuff, we're done. Last week we delivered the last software in production (14 core-applications and a whole new database structure) and today we pulled "future" data through the system for a integration test and it's all sorted. Backwards and forwards compatible throughout the entire chain. I am one *very* happy camper.
My job is done. I can leave and the project owner is very happy with the result. We're the first company in the sector to be done and we're bragging about it publicly I even sent proof of us celebrating our success to the project manager at the "competitor", who happens to be a direct colleague of mine who was hired on his own "mission impossible". (I *know* he would have done it.... )
My boss the project owner is now biting his nails over how to explain the budget to the board....but oh well..... it's just money. Well... a whole truck load full but what the heck. It's all in the game, right?
I'm glowing and I intend to continue to glow until at least next Monday.
R..
Last Feb. I got hired to take over a software project in problems. They had "received" a budget and had spent 20% of it without delivering a single thing. No approach, no functional definition, no vision, no principles, no architecture, nothing. They didn't even have a firm statement of scope let alone buy-in or support from the business....bad bad bad.... Worse yet, they had hired a whole team of externals and had them doing stuff all in the wrong order, the software architecture was an unimaginable chaos, the architect had abandoned ship and when I came the project manager's lights had gone out for couple of weeks. (that's why they hired me)
Now *that's* MY kind of mess. I like stuff like this. The bigger the mess, the more I like it.
The only thing that wasn't changing was the deadline. The entire sector was going over on 1-1-2007 regardless of what was happening at my client. During the intake, we spoke about a lot of issues but when we talked about the amount of work to be done and how it had been structured, the project owner was *literally* biting his finger nails....
And no wonder.
So after looking it all over, we took the job with the commitment (addressing the nail biting) that whatever happened we'd be on time, fit for use, and the quality would be good.
But don't talk to me about budget. If the train is derailing and you have to pull hard on two corners of the project triangle, then you still need room to move...
We got agreement on this and away we went.
It wasn't easy. but skipping over a lot of stuff, we're done. Last week we delivered the last software in production (14 core-applications and a whole new database structure) and today we pulled "future" data through the system for a integration test and it's all sorted. Backwards and forwards compatible throughout the entire chain. I am one *very* happy camper.
My job is done. I can leave and the project owner is very happy with the result. We're the first company in the sector to be done and we're bragging about it publicly
I even sent proof of us celebrating our success to the project manager at the "competitor", who happens to be a direct colleague of mine who was hired on his own "mission impossible". (I *know* he would have done it.... )My boss the project owner is now biting his nails over how to explain the budget to the board....but oh well..... it's just money. Well... a whole truck load full but what the heck. It's all in the game, right?
I'm glowing and I intend to continue to glow until at least next Monday.
R..
