23 March 2001
Last year: I've said it before and I'll say it again. I don't really care much for dogs.
Ding-dong, the witch is dead!
About halfway through the day yesterday, I got an e-mail saying there would be a meeting for my project at 3:00.
Now, if you've been paying attention at all, you know I mostly hate my project. It's the sort of project that's based entirely on one person's vision, and he's not a communicator. So every time we produce something, he says, "No, that's not quite it. Try again," without actually giving us much in the way of a hint as to why it's wrong.
So I dragged into that meeting yesterday with a vague sense of dread. What new "vision" were we going to be called to produce now?
As it turns out, our Corporate office had paused in the act of signing on to the final phase of this monstrosity. They asked the man with the vision, "These banks you say you've got signed on as partners in this... Can we see some proof of commitment from them?"
Mr. Vision immediately faxed a memorandum from one bank, which essentially said that the project had some promise and that they'd be interested in looking into it - but which laid out no actual commitment on either side. Corporate was Not Impressed. They informed Mr. Vision that he had until the close of business today to produce something a little more firm than that, or they were going to halt work.
As of 3:00 yesterday, Mr. Vision had not produced anything with which Corporate was impressed. The meeting was to tell us that the project was about to end (unless, of course, a miracle occurs) and to give us instructions for baselining and archiving our work on it to date.
We talked to the project manager, who assured us that the fault didn't lay with any of us. "Only one out of ten commercial products succeeds," he told us over the speakerphone. "That one funds the other nine attempts, plus some more. This wasn't it, but we learned some valuable lessons for future work." So it seems Corporate is chalking this one up as a learning experience.
I just hope one of the things they learned is to get hard specs in writing, in the future. We're programmers, not mind readers.
We spent the rest of the afternoon feeling giddy with relief. I know, normally it's not a thing of joy that a major project is cancelled. But the project was so poorly conceived in the first place, and if it had taken off in spite of itself, we weren't going to be able to handle the volume of production it called for anyway.
Word of the Day:
two-bit - of the value of two bits; cheap, trivial, petty
Currently Reading:
- The White Plague by Frank Herbert
Current Projects:
- garden planning