Who's fault is it? (Odd Musings)
Friday is my last day at this client.
I have one (ish - they are still debating over another report) to get done by 5:00 tomarrow.
I keep getting questions and changes for old reports. Stuff that should have been decided a year ago.
So who's fault is it? The people doing the RFP/ADR whosacallits 2 years ago for not writing it down? Not asking the right questions? Not asking enough questions?
Or is it the client. Who, has had me down their backs every couple of weeks (for over a year) asking, "what is supposed to be on this report?". yet everytime i get a blank stare, blowoff or another 100 pages of blank paper with a heading on each of them. hello trees. /sigh
I got derailed.
Or is it the client. Did they not think far ahead of what they needed? Are they lazy (which state workers often are)? Did they just think reports are not that important, or could it be that their only documentation for any of their reports was a printout of an ancient example (they didnt' even replace with newones if the report got updated) and COBOL code.
I'm going to say it is a little of both. if we didn't have the documentation, i should have put something better together instead of listening to my boss saying "just do it, just give them something to look at". Dang it, they could be a little more forthcomming with some information/documentation. I understand people may forget to do something cause we are only human, but for over a year i poked and prodded for answers on one report.
I feel better now, but feel free to tell me what you think!
Posted by
tennille
on Thursday, January 30, 2003 at 01:56 PM
Comments (2)
Comments
Posted by petehed on January 30, 2003 03:01 PM
My job is product development... the product takes over two years to create, and it is an entirely different type of work than services, however my girlfriend and a lot of my friends work(ed) for a web development firm and often complained of similar issues.
My impression was that this was often a problem of process: meaning that the process used to obtain requirements and build a project plan was inadequate and/or inflexible.
The clients are fools. Always. There is nothing that you can do about that. If they weren't fools, they wouldn't need to hire you to do what they can't do (or won't do). So, the onus is somewhat on the service provider to be able to have a process that is capable of dealing with the flux of client interaction. In engineering, we call this 'foolproofing' :).
Don't get me wrong... this is EXTREMELY hard, and I reckon that one could create an entire company that did nothing but develop processes for service providers to do this (I know there are software companies that try and 'facilitate' the process).
I don't think I'd necessarily try and lay blame and determine fault (that's what lawyers are for), but I think understanding where the system failed is important if you need/want to fix it (maybe that's just the engineer talking).
If the problem persists from client to client and never gets fixed...
it's management's fault :).
Posted by tennille on January 31, 2003 10:53 AM
ahh, they finally gave me the example to the report they've been dodging me about for over a year ;) wuwu last day whee!
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