Great Project Management



  • So I have sat idle on a project 4 weeks now (I have plenty of other projects to keep me busy). The project was to add layered contract billing. My billing stuff was done when I was asked to modify it to itemize the billing items by the contract that it was billed from. Not a big deal I made the change, only to see a PK violation. I knew why right away, the layered contract IDs would need to be added to the table, and added to the clustered index. (Yep all of the tables here uses 5-10 clustered column indexes).

    I asked my project manager about this, and she said that the scripts were already done for those tables to do this and was waiting for the DBAs to take care of them.  (Took 2 weeks to get that answered)

    It took 2 weeks to get the changes made to the DB....

    I finally had time to work on changing the classes that handle the 2 tables effected today. As I am about to start I say to myself "Self... do you think other forms might be using these classes then just my billing piece? Self, sounds like something I should check". A quick check idenified over 20 other forms and classes that are impacted by this.

    I politely ask my PM if she was aware of this and got my head chewed off that I should have told her this 4 weeks ago. (I have not been asked to do any of the impact analysis, she has relied on the contractor she hired to, and he did not do one for these tables because it was not part of the original requirements. Not his fault, all hers for not letting him know or asking for another IA).

    Now I am waiting for her to tell me how this is all going to be fixed because she wants this in production in 7 days...



  • Sometimes, when a bad project manager shouts at you, the best thing you can do is shout back.

     Other times, the best thing you can do is find a different project to work on.

    It's sad, but it's true :(
     



  • Management by intimidation is usually a sign that the yeller/manager is incompetent and realizes this, or made a mistake him/herself and realizes this and is very insecure. The yelling is an attempt to distract and misdirect blame. In my experience, this is a consistent rule.


     



     



  • @matthewr81 said:

    "do you think other forms might be using these classes then just my billing piece?"

    <grammar_nazi>"other than", not "other then"</grammar_nazi> 



  • Rather than complaining about the PM, you could perhaps make duplicate classes under different names, modify those to suit you, and then make sure your form uses them... Then again you didn't say what platform you're working with so I could just be talking out my ass.



  • @Spacecoyote said:

    Rather than complaining about the PM, you could perhaps make duplicate classes under different names, modify those to suit you, and then make sure your form uses them... Then again you didn't say what platform you're working with so I could just be talking out my ass.

    Be sure to name it "billingHandler_2" and to go out of your way to avoid commenting.



  • <pedantic>effected -> affected</pedantic>



  • @Spacecoyote said:

    Rather than complaining about the PM, you could perhaps make duplicate classes under different names, modify those to suit you, and then make sure your form uses them... Then again you didn't say what platform you're working with so I could just be talking out my ass.

    It is a large VB6 windows form project with shared classes for all DB interaction, hence why I am supposed to use the classes rather than just doing something in my own datalayer and such.

     As an update though, we had our weekly status meeting later that afternoon where I was I received an apology (which is gives me a lot more respect for the PM) and I came up with a solution that would get us by. (Optional parameters on the effected class routines that are set to our default IDs, not great, but as the entire project which is 12 years old is being rewritten in .Net at the end of the year we all felt we could live with it for now)



  • I tried it with the tags, but they disappeared, so imagine there's a "grammar_nazi" tag around the following line:

    "grammar errors", not "grammer errors"


    and an "XML_nazi" tag around the following line (I know, I still used a quote, but whaddya gonna do?)

    &quot;, not "

    Or possibly

    CDATA["] not "



  • I'm pretty sure that quotes are allowed in text, the only problem is when they appear in an attribute.


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