the project
There's a Project at my workplace that's been going for more than 5 years. Initially it was meant to come to fruition 4 years ago but somehow has ballooned to a 5 year job.
Part of my role at work involves creating customer-facing stuff. Up to the present day a colleague and I have been doing this using third party software which has been inflexible, slow and frustrating to use. Part of this new Project aims to bring that all in-house in a more flexible and easy to use stylee.
Last year I was involved in several The Project project meetings where a colleague and I were asked for our specific requirements for this. We had to explain to The Project project management team in painstaking detail what we were doing, how we did it and how we would like to be able to do it in the future.
I'd never been in management meetings before, most of it was full of bollocks words like "delivered", "solutions", "MVP" and "synergy" - these management people may as well have been talking in Martian, they conversed in some version of language that was completely alien to me.
So we wrote our specs for this job in a document and added it to the ridiculously confusing and very performative project management software they were using and then had meetings about the document. They seemed to understand our requirements.
After that it went quiet for about 9 months. I occasionally talked to one of The Project's developers who would tell me how his part of the project was going (not good) and how sometimes he felt that he was leading The Project because he was having to make suggestions and ask questions about things that should have been managed by The Project's project management team and their intricate project management software.
The Project then got to the testing stage, whereupon a handful of employees were asked to test The Project and give feedback. The feedback came in such numbers that the launch date for The Project, slated for early summer, was put back to late summer to give the developers time to address the bugs and problems.
We're now in Autumn and The Project has been pushed back once more to December and then on to next year. All this time we have seen absolutely nothing regarding the part of The Project that we're supposed to be using whenever it goes live.
Yesterday we received a very garbled email from one of The Project's project management team asking if we were understanding the processes in The Project that we will be using to do our job.
I blew my top.
Firstly, because WE GAVE THEM THE PROCESS IN DOCUMENT FORM AS REQUESTED IN ONE OF THOSE PAINFUL, BUZZWORD INFESTED MEETINGS WE HAD TO SIT THROUGH LAST YEAR.
Secondly, because THERE ARE NO FUCKING PROCESSES BECAUSE THE PART WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE USING IN 2 MONTH'S TIME HASN'T EVEN BEEN FUCKING BUILT YET.
With that in mind and from what that dev guy said, I'm wondering if this project is being managed at all, or whether these people are just playing at project management in the hope that, if it goes well, they get massive kudos and if it goes badly they can blame the developer team.
There's a meeting booked for next week to discuss this email (which my colleague replied to with "we don't know, we have nothing to go on") which will no doubt be filled with buzz words and the management equivalent of modem noises whilst I stare out of the window wondering why The Project will be nearly 6 years overdue by the time it's released.