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January 09, 2004
Project Management vs Software Engineers
You may (or may not) recall that I have been working on a performance problem (see this post and this post for details). Yesterday I came across a reference (now unfortunately lost) to this article which is really relevant (as you will see in a minute) because it covers the way project managers knock back software engineer issues.
Relevance? Well this problem has been occupying lots of time (both human time and computer time) since the week before Christmas. We have been trying to identify the bottleneck in one of these multi-tier systems and it looks like the culprit is in the nameless application server. It could be the application server itself or the internally written application that runs on the application server.
After the meeting with the PHC, there was another meeting with architect from the PHC's company who helped design the original application. Someone outlined the problem. His response: "Yup. We knew that would happen. We were going to implement progress bars but I guess they ran out of time. Too bad." Umpteen man (and in some cases woman) weeks wasted to investigate a "known" problem that had not been communicated from development to support to operations. Now the users want it fixed and instead of leaning on the project team (who is going to pay for that?) they lean on the poor suckers supporting the systems it runs on.
If I were the BOFH, I would make sure that all those problem tickets and callouts were being redirected to the project manager and that he (or she) had to face the music. In the case of the car vs bridge article above, the BOFH would make sure that the project manager had to live under that bridge....
Posted by Ozguru at January 9, 2004 08:01 AM
Comments
Posted by: ozguru at January 9, 2004 08:01 AM
