Funny story

This is a little rant about the project that I have been working on for the past little while, the same project that sent me to Asia twice last year. I am not working on it much any more because it was a complete and total disorganized disaster. The people in charge here have been working on the project by themselves with it closely tucked into their shirt.

This is how bad it was. When I was in Asia one of the clients asked me a question about the requirements for a single module. I looked at her and scratched my head because I did not even know what that module was and what it was responsible for. Thats how bad it was.

Back to the present. Its January 9th, the project "super visor" (I prefer to call him the "ruiner") came up with a list of things that needed to be done by the 15th and given to the client which would close off this portion and allow the company to get paid. [Have I mentioned that because the "ruiner" is not allowing anyone else to help out on some parts the project is already 7 months late?] Which is fine, whatever. It was 4 business days that they gave us to work on things. On the list were about 22 items. I had 5 items that I needed to do. There was some programming and some reports that I needed to create/fix and then give to the client. Which is fine, I had created about 12 reports for the client already so I was familiar with what needed to be done and the software.

I worked my ass off doing all of the things that I had on the list and getting them done. Hell, I even finished by morning of the 14th.

We had a meeting yesterday to go over everything. It was the 21st and there are still 11 items on the list that aren't even started! Like wtf? How does that happen? Here I was working hard for nothing. How can the company be satisfied with the way this project is going when nothing gets done at all? We promise the client something and then don't deliver? Its no wonder the guy who is over there now has called/emailed the boss with complaints from the clients because nothing is as its supposed to be.

The best point of all. This isn't really our fault. Well not completely. This project is based upon a features document which outlines all of the components of the project, it should have never been signed. When the project was awarded, they didn't really know what they wanted. They only knew that they wanted a system to help streamline their business processes.

Fine.

They have a webmapping component. The document states that they required the ability to print from the web both graphical and textual information on A4 paper. Great. It already does that. Now that they've had time to think about it, they want the web mapping to print based on a template and started yelling for that. If they had of told us 6 months ago about this, then it would be different.

Do you know how hard it is to complete something when someone keeps giving you new stuff to add on top of it?