The Project

I started this blog to try to cover an engineering project that I am managing at work. It seems to have morphed into general technology subjects. That's ok. I will still talk about the project from time to time. Right now is one of those times.

I got in touch with my guy down south at the other company that we are working with. I was looking at our schedule and I have to think that all of our dates have slipped by a few months. This is not really a good thing. Why did the dates slip? The vendor put out a schedule that I said was too agressive to begin with. I'm glad that I told everyone I could that I didn't think that they could do the schedule. My ass is covered. The vendor that is doing the software is overextended. I call them, e-mail them, meet with them, and just generaly bug this piss out of them to get things to us on time. As a project manager, there is nothing that I can do at this point to keep these guys on schedule. In hindsight what would I do about these guys? At the start of this project I had some concerns about this vendor. One main concern I had was ensuring that they had a documented development process that they followed. What they had was a little looser than that, but they do have a process and they do use it for the most part. It is just your basic iterative waterfall model process. We should have used an XP process or one of the derivatives of it. If we would have used XP, I would not be asking for prototypes all the time, I wouldn't have to sweat the schedule so much because we would be making iterative progress that I could show to senior management. One saving grace for us is that we set up the conracts to pay out on deliveries. So, we haven't spent too much cash yet.