I think I have truly turned into a grumpy old man, I have just left one contract and am now in an other. My expectation is that I’ll have the same problems that I had at my last contract, the customers will have an intellect that is quite likely to exceed that of a solitary building brick – it might not be a match for two building bricks though. The first month seems to have proven me correct, I arrived to find that the job is a datacenter migration. It should be pretty easy as the equipment has been replicated in the new location, it has been replicated exactly, right down to hardware, OS Versions, Firmware Revisions etc…
In actual fact one of the major problems was the delay in sourcing all the equipment, sometimes it takes a while for the exact item to come up on Ebay. Yes that it is where much of the equipment came from, as most of it is out of production and support. Still I’ve only been here a month – I’m sure it will get better.
Anyway we’ve had one dry run, our target for the go live is eight hours – we’ll have to improve a bit as the dry run has taken eight days. There would seem to be a bit of room for improvement on this one, the next dry run is January sometime so we’ll see how it goes.
The current team comprises three techies with a management team of seven, good to be appreciated isn’t it!
Well, at least we are getting rid of our muppets (by losing our jobs and no longer working for them)! And useful people (By making them superfluous, instead replacing them with off shore inexperienced graduates)). And productive staff (same as useful people, really). And friends. And colleagues. Basically, anyone worth having. But we are keeping the (project) managers. Ohhhhh crap…………
In short, we are in rapid decline. Sinking ships, and all that
Ah Ian,
You obviously don’t understand why we need project managers, normally they are only there to report peoples failings to management. By doing this they deflect attention from them selves, in order to maximize the gain from this they will frequently hold an other progress meeting and then say that they will have to raise an other risk against the project.
When this is reported to more senior management, it is usually reported as – the projects going down the pan but it’s everyone’s fault but mine. This means that as they are reporting things accurately they get kept on till the end of the project – “simples”!
Beauregarde……….