Avoid Duplication

The customer needed some sweeping changes in our system. Happens all the time. However we were busy with all kinds of other changes. So schedules were tight. The project manager said we would put these new changes on hold. That way we could finish our current changes and address the new ones in due time. Worked for me.

Then our project manager went on vacation for a whopping month. The deputy project manager took over. He must not have got the memo. Or he did and ignored it. All of a sudden, we were on the hook for all these new changes. This new manager told me to knock out the design in a day or so. I informed him there was no way that was going to happen. We had costed the effort. Design was a long term effort. But I spent about a week and knocked something out.

There was also a rushed review with the customer. Turns out not all of my design documentation was sent to the customer for review. Never mind that. I was apparently late for coding. Then I started doing some coding. Finally I had to call shennanigans. This was just not how things could work. I escalated up the problems, and got some time to do the design. There was gnashing of teeth, but the schedule got extended to do design.

I ended up with an accelerated coding phase. And then the design walk through with the customer happened right about when I was finishing coding. So much for dependencies and the good old waterfall method. Then guess what? Not all of my documentation got sent to the customer. This was starting to sound like a bad movie. More on this later.