Thursday, November 13, 2003

Actual Email..

This is an actual email I recently sent to a friend who used to be a Project Manager:

You have been a project manager.. (or played one on tv). Is this the appropriate way to go about setting up a series of meetings:

First: spend a ton of time figuring out how to use the “auto select” feature in Outlook, so it will find times when everyone is available. Note: there are only 4 people invited to these meetings. Meanwhile, everyone is holding their schedules open waiting for the series of meetings to get set up.

Second: send the invitations to the 10 meetings in rapid succession. Do not include location because you haven’t booked the rooms yet. Later, when you book the rooms, you’ll be sending out updates to the meeting to fill everyone’s mailbox even more. Then when you can’t find available rooms for the scheduled meetings, you’ll have to reschedule the meetings and send 12 more updates while trying to get agreement on time.

Project Managers response: I believe this is standard CMM* procedure. Please refer to the Project Managers check list of how to make a project completely unbearable as found in the extensive CMM documentation.

* Capability Maturity Model: an extremely bureaucratic process used in technology projects where everything must be documented. There is documentation on the documentation, the documentation takes 3 times as long as the project, you practically need a whole person just to make sure all the documentation gets done - not to DO the documentation, just to coordinate the documentation.

Thursday, November 06, 2003

Attention Developers

Do not send out mass emails to announce that something is fixed when, in fact, you have only fixed it on the version of the code on your local computer. If you are the only person who can it working, it’s not fixed to anyone but you. It hasn’t been tested and in fact there are numerous reasons why something would work locally, not not once it’s in the system.

Thank you for your attention