Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[maria.winslow at windows-linux.com (Maria C Winslow)]

This is hilarious! You would be doing the world a favor if you wrote this up 
in an article for the INW website!

Maria

On Friday 28 February 2003 3:41 pm, BigLee Haslup wrote:
> This posting has two purposes, the first (and hopefully most interesting)
> is to contribute a few more scenarios to the software development
> nightmares thread. Here goes...
> I had the dubious pleasure of being rather near the epicenter of a huge
> corporate re-engineering death march some years ago. It was at a large
> multi-national corporation that was divided into fiefdoms that lined up,
> roughly, along lines of market regions, business tool sets and
> technologies, and wildly different understandings of the common corporate
> data. There was a general understanding that this division of the company
> into "silos" was at best wildly inefficient and, more damaging, often
> pitted one part of the company against another. A decision was made to
> "re-engineer" the company, defining a new, common business process and, at
> the same time, develop a suite of new tools to support the new processes.
> I was, at the time, the team leader and architect for a small team of
> Smalltalk coders working on a tool to do pre-order budgetary quotations. We
> had made the grave mistake of succeeding somewhat in excess of our mandate
> and, as the re-engineering effort got underway we found our tool selected
> to be the order-capture front end for the new order-processing tool suite.
> It is a great tribute to the talented team I had working for me, and to the
> flexibility of projects developed in Smalltalk, that we were largely able
> to keep up with the constantly changing requirements as the corporate
> process wars raged about us. In the end the quest for agreement on a single
> corporate business process failed and the project caved in; an expenditure
> of many tens of millions of dollars came up with nothing. All software that
> had been developed was scrapped since it was designed to facilitate a
> process that was nowhere adopted. A few aspects of the disaster
> particularly stick in my mind.
> The 90 Day Wonder.
> It first occurred to me that the people I was working with had gone mad
> when I heard a vice-president, while explaining the 90-day schedule, ask
> the rhetorical question: "Why can't a software development project be run
> in three shifts to get it done in one-third the time?" Everyone around the
> table nodded except me. That meeting launched a project that lasted, as I
> recall, somewhat more than a year but was, at all points, 90 days from
> completion by executive decree. As one set of executives lost credibility,
> another set would take over, but the 90 days to completion remained
> constant. The Suicide Pact
> Knowing that the 90 day schedule would be difficult to achieve a decision
> was made to pull most of the IT staff off of maintaining the existing
> systems so they could be deployed to help with the new systems. This meant
> that needed improvements were not made and new products were not added
> (because these issues would all be addressed by the new system.) The result
> was that as the unrealistic schedule slid there was no recourse but to
> panic, adding more resources and spending more money to get it finished as
> quickly as possible. By the time the plug was pulled the project had a cast
> of hundreds, many of the high-dollar outside consultants, and was burning
> money at an appalling rate.
> The Butt-head du Jour
> There was a series of overall project managers assigned to coordinate and
> facilitate the various process-reengineering and tool development efforts.
> Their primary task was to be confident at all times -- to *believe* that is
> was all possible and to rally the troops. They were swapped-out frequently,
> sometimes because of their allegiance to losers in the executive power
> struggles, but more often because they burned out like over-voltage light
> bulbs.
> The Zone of Certainty
> There were a few executives who seemed, for a while, to have pulled it all
> together. I remember one in particular who had a "Zone of Certainty" that
> extended about 400 yards in all directions from his person. While you were
> inside the zone everything seemed to make sense; you understood what you
> were doing, why is was needed and how to do it. It was probably an illusion
> created by his force of personality, and was ultimately unavailing in a
> geographically dispersed project (he couldn't be everywhere,) but I am
> still not sure that if we could have gotten the whole team inside the zone
> we might not have pulled it off.
> The Tar Pit
> There are certain serious problems that can never be addressed because they
> are complicated enough that any attempt to address them takes longer than
> the attention span of the executives. There are systems that were obsolete
> fifteen years ago that are still in use because each of the dozen attempts
> to replace them was abandoned because it was taking too long.
> The Bad Attitude Group
> Those who expressed doubts about the direction of the project were
> suspected of having a "bad attitude". One group so singled out took their
> affiliation with the group as a badge of pride. They periodically got
> together and held elections to designate a spokesman. His title was Head Of
> Software Engineering Bad Attitude Group (H.O.S.E.B.A.G.)
> ---------
> My other reason to send this is to see if I am still a member of the group.
> I just tried to change my email address and to switch from digest mode to
> individual messages. The mailman web site now lets me log in using my new
> email address but has sent me notices that all of my changes were rejected
> because the confirmation code didn't match. Sigh.... why doesn't anything
> ever just work like it is supposed to?
> BigLee Haslup
>
>From dminton at mindspring.com  Fri Feb 28 15:06:30 2003
From: dminton at mindspring.com (David Minton)
Date: Fri Feb 28 15:05:15 2003
Subject: [internetworkers] Re: Software Development Nightmares
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.0.20030228154052.044a5030 AT pop3.norton.antivirus>
Message-ID: <BA852B76.10532%dminton AT mindspring.com>

On 2/28/03 3:41 PM, "BigLee Haslup" <biglee AT haslups.com> wrote:

That was a terrific (at least funny for us) summary of what must have been a
sad state of affairs.

> The Zone of Certainty
> There were a few executives who seemed, for a while, to have pulled it all
> together. I remember one in particular who had a "Zone of Certainty" that
> extended about 400 yards in all directions from his person. While you were
> inside the zone everything seemed to make sense; you understood what you
> were doing, why is was needed and how to do it. It was probably an illusion
> created by his force of personality, and was ultimately unavailing in a
> geographically dispersed project (he couldn't be everywhere,) but I am
> still not sure that if we could have gotten the whole team inside the zone
> we might not have pulled it off.

This sounds like "The Reality Distortion Field." Sometimes it can even be
wielded successfully:

    Notes from the Epicenter: Exploring the Reality Distortion Field

    http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/9214.html?origin=story

David