Sat, 22 Sep 2007

Haste . . .

You know the addage . . .

Haste makes waste

No place is the more true than in Information Technology. I'm spending my day working rather than attending a company picnic because of this very thing. A major project at work ran into a situation which they could not get around with a deadline looming. The technical management made a decision which caused us to configure the test to be the simulation environment in a short period of time. Then they realized that they did not have an environment in which to test changes made because of findings in the simulation environment before placing the code back into the simulation environment. So . . .

They decided to set up a completely new "fix it" environment in which to do that. Because of the need to meet the deadline, these two environments were thrown together from bits and pieces in a haphazard and undocumented sort of way. This caused several problems which we have been fighting late into the night and this weekend. (Needless to say, the deadline was missed and we're scrambling to catch back up.

It seems interesting to me that the project management of this major problem -- consultants who are getting paid a great deal of money for their expertise in this area -- didn't catch the signs that something was wrong earlier in the process. After all, isn't that what project management is all about?

Anyway, that's water under the bridge. Now we're working long hours to make sure that things are working, at least well enough to meet the hard deadline this Monday.

posted 14:40 [/Technology] permanent link