ISO Nine-Thousand-and-Screwed / BWE

In which our Hero can’t stop thinking that “I So Screwed”

And that’s the ballgame… The rest of 2012 at work is just mop-up. Well, and a little bit of circus.

I pointed out to the client that they’d written my contract to require me to take 20 days off during the year. And my workload had not permitted that, so I was going to take my 20 days off at the end of the year. Which is to say… all of December. Well, they kind of freaked out and renewed me for three more weeks, which is good from a wallet perspective, but I was liking the thought of a month off.

Meanwhile my contract for next year is all but a done deal. Apparently one manager made a power play to get me transferred to him, and that prompted the department director to point out my official role, and the fact that I technically should belong to a different manager. So thanks to power-trip-boy calling attention to me, I’m moving to the manager I’ve been avoiding for years.

Partly it’s that he’s above average in terms of the contempt he inspires in me. Partly it’s that he already has a chunk of my time locked up and I’m deeply concerned that his controlling my assignments means that I’m going to get sucked into the support morass. I’m brilliant at technical support, but it’s a waste of my skill.

But just now, I realized a deeper, more important reason to avoid that branch of the org-chart tree. Support is one of the areas that’s threatened with moving to global control. And if we go global, than they’re probably going to want to use the global outsourcers, of which I am not one, nor am I willing to join them, assuming they can afford me.

Still, next year is almost baked.

Of course, there’s the little matter of the… umm… What do I call it? Promotion?

Despite joining this project already in flight, I’ve drifted back to my usual place at the front of the charge. After months of being able endure the barrage of stupidity by rationalizing that, “well, my role is to execute this specific task, and the people in charge can worry about making it make sense” but… they finally realized that they hadn’t really defined what the responsibilities were for the teams. So now instead of saying I don’t know what my role is at meetings, I introduce myself firmly as the solution architect.

The role is simple and complex. Simply, I’m the guy who understands, from top to bottom and from end to end. In detail, it means that I go to almost every single meeting because either I need to make sure I know what people are saying, or I need to be able to correct them. That’s part of understanding. But the other part is that I’m automatically the catch-basin for every single detail that gets dropped. If anybody thinks of something we missed, forgot to do, need to add, if we don’t know who to assign, it becomes my problem. And since we mostly don’t know who to assign, it’s all my problem.

Where the problem arises is that, as Mr Scott would say, “Ya cannae change the laws of Physics.”

Here’s the basics of a software engineering project. The beginning has four essential steps:

1. Find out what the users need (Business Requirements)
2. Figure out what the implications of those needs are (System Requirements, depends on Business Requirements)
3. Figure out how to address all the needs and the implications (System Design, depends on System Requirements)
4. Figure out how long it will take (Estimates, based on System Design)

That’s a nice clean simplistic view. You do those in order and you have a project. But it’s slow going, so in general, the steps overlap a little. Like how the business requirements usually take two weeks at the end to sign off, so you can start the next step early because the risk is really low. But the more you overlap, the more likely it is that a late-breaking change in the previous step will affect the one you’re working on. On the other hand, if you know what you’re building, you can often make very good educated guesses about the nature of your work.

It’s like if you were building a house while the buyer is still making up their mind about the plans. Moving an outlet or changing the kitchen cabinets is easy. Not so easy is if the client decides they need an extra floor or a different location. Get it, Gentle Reader?

Well, on this project they’re overlapping things so much it’s non-casual. We have to provide estimates before we’re done even doing the system requirements. But it’s okay, because we have to finish analyzing the requirements before we finish getting the business requirements. And anyway, the way they’re doing it, they’re never going to get a good set of requirements.

And now, I’m in charge. I have to get those estimates together from the team, and prepare them and possibly defend them to the leadership. It’s the biggest initiative in the Canadian company for the next few years. It’s a political black-hole, with so many groups with so many interests that every meeting is a minefield of what to disclose and what not to say.

It’s like they painted a big bulls-eye on my chest. Frankly I expect to be holding a big bag full of blame by the end of 2013, in front of the executives who own the people who push around the people who actually sign my contract. Part of me is so excited at the possibility of being forced out of this too-comfortable sinecure. Part of me still rails at the possibility of taking the blame for the decisions I protest daily.

It’s hugely stressful. My day is a running battle at this point, every day. I’m double booked absurdly. Politics requires me to attend meetings to stroke the egos of managers who need to appear to lead, and that keeps me out of the meetings where I can actually have a positive productive impact.

Oh. And there’s the minor detail that I”m only assigned 50% on this project. That’s right. Cast of thousands, someone who has been doing a tolerable job with this role since the start months ago, and they gave it to me as a part time thing. And not the part that my future manager cares about.

I don’t like the amount of stress. Don’t know why I feel it so much.

So I’ve been drawing. Nothing that’ll be shared here, it was a commission. Well, sort of. A request that I suspect will be regretted fiercely, once the result is done and shared. (laugh)

And now it’s two in the morning. I’m getting up in three hours, I should force myself to sleep.