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Tom Murrell wrote: "Changes happen. They are outside of your
control. Just make sure everyone knows why the schedule was blown (the
SME made late changes)"
I'm in a situation now where the specs for a large project have
been around until April, they were reviewed, but now, less than 30 days
before it's supposed to go to our clients, people are raising issues
about the functionality we're including and how it's going to affect our
clients. For several weeks, we've heard about needing to query some
clients' data to find out how massive of a change this project is going
to be and, for several weeks, certain (swamped with work) programmers
have said, "Oh yeah, I was going to do that." Last Friday, the Project
Manager blew up and said, "Didn't anyone read these specs? We reviewed
them in an ERC (enhancement review committee) meeting months ago." At
that point, my manager, who was raising several points that no one had
considered, raised her hand and calmly said, "I was invited to that
meeting."
The PM had no response.
As for my role, I'm waiting for programming changes to be made
before I can update my help text. The program was to be to me no later
than Monday. Guess what? At noon, the programmer was still working on
it. Guess I'll try tomorrow. <grin>
