RE: Set up to Fail

[John Posada <JPosada -at- book -dot- com>]

Brian...very good question. I did do a project plan and it was approved by
my management and his. Keep in mind that this is a system that both my
management and I didn't know much about....it was in another state. What was
conveyed from the top level was, in rough terms, to "document the crap out
of it" and we both knew what type of material belonged in the type of
document I was creating.

What neither of us knew (What was only known by top management) was that
where we had worked on a system that has 5 servers, this has 80, the
previous system had 6 MSMQ, this one has over 100, 6 stored procs vs. 1700,
no SQL tables vs. many...you get the idea.

It wasn't knowing what needed to be documented, it was the magnitude, which
I only truly found out a couple of months in as I opened each system.

In retrospect, I might have done things differently...I might have been the
third writer to run into the night.

> more appropriate response might be to propose and implement a project
> planning methodology.

sounds like something I should have included in my certification (gr&d)

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer
Barnes&Noble.com
jposada -at- book -dot- com
NY: 212-414-6656
Dayton: 732-438-3372
"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream
of things that never were, and ask why not?"
-----Robert Francis Kennedy, 1968 presidential campaign



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian Das [mailto:brian_das -at- hotmail -dot- com]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 2:36 PM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: Re: Set up to Fail
> 
> 
> 
> Ok, waaaaaait a minute.
> 
> Why didn't the project start with an effort to plan the 
> documentation, and
> estimate resources based on agreed-upon statements of quality 
> and scope, and
> get sign-off on the plan? On a huge project that's failed 
> twice before, I'd
> say it's time for someone to step up. This stinks of lousy project
> management.
> 
> Take the compliment, by all means -- but make sure you don't 
> respond by
> complimenting your boss on his project management skills! <g> 
> Seriously, the
> more appropriate response might be to propose and implement a project
> planning methodology.
> 

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