The meeting that I mentioned in the previous post was officially the “Lessons Learned” meeting, I for one learned that with a ratio of project managers to techies of seven to three we’re a bit top heavy and the customer is probably paying far too much. I don’t ever recall working in an environment where the skew on staff was like that, the last project that I worked on which was very similar had only two project managers and eight techies – presumably you can see why I think the numbers don’t make any sense here. I’d just like to add that the project which was bigger in terms of data and numbers of machines was done quickly and from what I can gather was completed within budget!
Still I’d like to bet that the customer is paying top dollar for this work – or lack of work as far as I can see, the jollies where numbers of staff are off to Europe for meetings – again this is beginning to sound familiar. Still maybe this is the grumpy old man syndrome creeping in here, but I’m not sure if it’s that or just pure unadulterated cynicism that I must have been given by someone. At the last office where I worked there was someone there and I never managed to work out what he did, other than upset other team members – even after a number of years. Well it would seem that there are several people in the team that work like that except I think I could work beside them for decades before I worked out what they did.
One final point would be the resourcing level of the techies, there are three of us as I said and in time honoured fashion there is some redundancy involved – they really only need about half a person. But as I’m sure that they will be charging a daily consultancy rate for what I and the other techies are doing I think we will probably have some more here before too long.
I pointed out in an earlier post that some of the delays were due to the time that it took to source certain items on Ebay, well that is true – other things that seem to have contributed to the delay are the FUD factor that is “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt” fostered I suspect by people who would like to see this project cost as much as possible. Ooops, grumpieness or cynicism not sure which. I from a personal view point will be driving this forward as fast as I can as I have no desire to stay here any longer than absolutely necessary, I’d probably even be happy to go back and try and teach the Lord of Darkness about Unix – even if it would be like talking to /dev/null!
Ther must be a song title in that somewhere…..
Oh yes! “You’re the /dev/null in disguise,…. oh yes you are…..”