Today I had a game of email ping pong, or wiff waffif Boris Johnston (Lord Mayor of London) is to be believed. Unfortunately the person that I was corresponding with has some things that he could learn from the aforementioned Boris – I am in fact assuming that Boris can read something more convoluted that a menu here. The correspondent is our illustrious project manager, yes that’s right the same project manager who asked in a meeting who’s responsibility was it to produce the project plan. When it was mentioned that the clue was probably in his job title, there were several people who had to stifle the laughter or press the mute button on the phone that they were using. For our entertainment today we had a communications error, as it was based on one of my emails I probably have to take some of the blame.
The section of the email that caused the problem went something like this;
Once the parts have arrived from Oracle we will require an outage of 1 – 2 hours including contingency to fit the parts.
This when the information was being cascaded to other people in the project team it had somehow changed to;
The Systems Admin says he can have the system ready in two hours.
Had we both been talking about the same thing, this wouldn’t really have been a problem – however as we weren’t it was. The original request for information had related to getting a server ready and it was ready for the applications to be set up, the server had in fact been configured as requested and was working from the 30th of November. Now although the server had been configured as requested and would allow the work to proceed, the additional CPUs and Memory had still to be installed – these are fairly essential parts when it comes to testing a server. Particularly when it comes to testing the performance of the server, I had pointed out that the server was ready for the initial testing to start. But that the performance testing would have to wait until the additional hardware had been installed, the response “They want to start with the performance testing” was somewhat baffling especially as I’d pointed out that this wasn’t possible.
So after some thought I’ve decided that the project manager is adopting a phased approach the the project, this is simple to understand.
- Phase 1 – Piss everyone off.
- Phase 2 – Be surprised when everone is pissed off and not co-operating.
- Phase 3 – Ensure that everyone stays pissed off.
- Phase 4 – Tell the bosses that everyone is pissed off and not co-operating.
- Phase 5 – Blame everyone else as they wouldn’t help and the project is delayed!
Now you may think that I’m being unreasonable here, well I might be – I think that Margaret Thatcher was a communist after all. On a lighter note my two colleagues in Germany found the office that they were going to, after seeking technical support from the car hire company. They got some one to come out and set the Sat-Nav to communicate in English – on arrival one of my colleagues went for a massage. Presumably because the hire Mercedes was uncomfortable, not because the masseuse had been thrown out of the Gestapo for cruelty!
My cat however is not impressed and has decided to stay wrapped in the curtains, stateing that i’ll only leave when the project is back on track – god how I wish it was me!