Halloween stories of bad Project Management during Software Development. Based on actual experiences.
The Halloween Horror Stories
1
It’s your first day at work. The project manager almost has to crawl to enter the small space the client assigned you as an office. You are on the top floor of the building. Blinding lights besiege its white walls — no window allows itself to be seen. You’d think dark corners would be as bad as it gets.
He tells you that the requirements for this project have been established — you should read them and start coding. The project manager then shows you a sample interface to give you an idea of what you need to deliver. He introduces you to the “backend guy” that might take care of the database design.
You take a hard look at the tasks at hand. This project has two months allocated to it. “That doesn’t seem too bad” — you might say. Then the PM leaves, and you are left by yourself.
Of course, you are working for the company’s client. You basically need to enhance their app, replacing some of its features. In noticing this, you go to the 5th floor, where their IT department is, and you meet with them. You ask them to setup their legacy application for you. Maybe you ask for a code repo or some documentation. Doesn’t anyone understand? You need their application running so that you can work on top of it.
They tell you that they will “ship” a whole desktop with the configured application running, so that you may launch and modify it on a stage environment. You don’t know better and you agree to this.
A week goes by. The PM arrives at noon, as usual, and tells us that we need to keep requesting the guys on the 5th floor to get a working environment, since we want to deliver our project on time. After all, it has already been paid for. He then leaves again, as he had arrived, and doesn’t come back till another week.
The client takes a month to complete the request. Now, as fate would have it, you only have one month to complete your work. At the end of the month…guess what? You still don’t have a working environment from them. So you’ve been working on a standalone UI and some additional db schema without really knowing how it will integrate to anything. Its a standalone backend-less application. You need to figure out what to do to clean this mess up, and how to explain to your employer how these last two months went by.
2
You’ve been working for two months at this other company. Your manager asks you for a new flow in the application — an app you just started working with and are still getting familiar with the framework and technology. He proceeds to draw three squares on the conference room whiteboard, some excuse for a GUI mock, and tells you that these screens are what make up the new desired flow.
He asks you if you can complete all of this for Friday. “This Friday??” — you ask. He didn’t ask for any estimates, nor performed any planning. He just wants to you to acknowledge that the time he gave you to complete this project is accepted by you.
You say “sure”. Well, that is what he actually hears. What you really say is that you are not sure but that you will try your best to accomplish this within the timeframe. You are, at this point, not even sure about all the requirements. You don’t even know the story behind this project — you don’t know that it has been late for 3 months, since a previous developer never had the time to start working on it.
Weeks later and everyone is being yelled at (of course by email) because the project is overflowing with bugs and it’s already four months behind…
3
The company you work for has a mandatory agile training course that you need to attend, especially since you need to complete your mandatory training hours this year. The training consists on business practices for agile, and lasts for a whole week.
Everything you hear is buzzwords mushed together, on how a business should approach agile methodologies. All abstract examples… nothing concrete.
They probably paid 5k down per head. It’s not even an introduction to agile, just a preparation for the transition to come. There’s even exercises where you work in teams to do some sort of origami a five year old could get away with. What a waste of time…
After what appears to be decades of useless training, or, after the week goes by, you start noticing that something even worse starts happening at the office. You didn’t know but… your team has been promoted to an agile team. Congratulations! Everybody gets diplomas. Wow! we are such efficient now. (I really wish I could lie, or hide under a rock, and say that I didn’t get that diploma mailed to me).
Supposing this is really agile. You are working exactly the same way, but every manager in the department is reporting to the VP that agile practices are being executed, and your team even gets compliments for doing so.
You have nightmares of your least favorite buzzword. A small child repeatedly whispers every second through your ears. Agile. AGILE… agile… agile…
4
You’re working at a startup, with a project manager that works remotely. The team has no idea what they are trying to accomplish, who the clients are, who the stakeholders of the product are. Everyone seems to be clueless about the why’s. They just go to work everyday and do some guesswork.
There’s only one senior architect who decides on technology, security, and maintains the entire important codebase. Meanwhile, one other person modifies the company’s website and another one writes a demo app.
Four years as a startup and you haven’t launched yet. No clue how much more to get it “done” — whatever that means. When will anything be ever ready…
5
You work at an office where the CEO just went to India to participate in a yoga retreat. All your coworkers are randomly guessing at what the goal of the company is. They work on some small projects, which they barely ship. They maintain 2 sites and revenue is growing, little by little…
One of the projects is related to a vision, or maybe it is a dream, that the CEO had while away. Something about pirates and the Caribbean…
Your latest project is very ambitious. It will change the company’s position as a domain name registrar worldwide. There are two diagrams made by an intern on how the architecture of some services need to look like. And yet, no one ever talks about any road map to get the project rolling.
To make it worse, upon entering the company building, the first thing that guests see is a hole showcasing itself right in the middle of the floor. A first taste of our beloved company. Our company’s dedication at first glance. I wish I didn’t know that rats used to crawl underneath us…
You leave the company, since there are unsanitary working conditions — the fungus on the building has already caused you a dry cough every other afternoon. And yet, six years later, the company is either doing the same thing that it used to do, or it shut down and left their website running…
6
You work at a startup, and there is no project manager. You are a small team of 10 people. Features are born spontaneously, at every step of the way. Technical Debt abounds.
Your team has about a dozen projects running at the same time. Everything is almost ready — but not quite there yet. You are unable to take a deep breath, or take your time on finishing any project to professional standards. The next one is creeping behind you, like in the Tell-Tale Heart story, threatening to swallow you whole if you don’t pay it the attention it desires.
You are tired of giving excuses to your team, to contractors, to consultants. Some team members bring up the idea of hiring a project manager, and management decides to talk about this the next week.
A week goes by. It has been decided that we don’t need to hire a project manager. But every time the guesstimates don’t work we keep kicking ourselves, getting yelled at, knowing deep down that there has to be a better way…
7
You work for this employer, and your manager is not sure what the next project is (or why they hired you). You are waiting 4 months without work. Doing nothing…just browsing the web. But you still have to be at the office 40 hours a week because…why not? You open up Facebook, and you see a liked post from your friends. It reads something like “Life is about the moments that take your breath away”…