65

# Day 0:

Me: "Hey boss, I want to let you know that I need this kind of information from the customer for these features, otherwise I cannot finish the project's milestone in two weeks."

Boss: "OK, just continue as far as you can get. We have to get this finished."

Me: "Well, I cannot go any further for these tickets. I need that input. Shall we leave them in todo?"

Boss: "OK."

# Day 7:

Boss: "Whe didn't you start on these tickets in todo?

Me: "As I have told you, I need some information."

Boss: "We gotta get this out of the door!"

Me: "Yes, if we want to meet the deadline, we should. Yet I cannot guess the feature. Also, let me create a column: `to clarify` and move that ticket there. As I have said: I need that information. You have to contact the customer about it and get their feedback.

Boss: "OK."

# Day 13:

Boss: "Why isn't this project finished? There are still tickets open."

Me: "You never provided the information I asked you about."

Boss: "I want an explanation not an excuses."

Me o_O: "This is the explanation. I was asking you on multiple occasions about the required feedback. You never provided it. See the columns name? It's called `to clarify`. We created it last time together. That clarification never happened even though I told you that I need it. I cannot do magic. I can only implement features, and while I can sometimes make intelligent guesses to their use cases, I rather implement their actual ones than my fictional ones.

Boss: "You should have told me."

Me: ಠ_ಠ

Comments
  • 10
    ..and getting the information you need probably takes less time than asking multiple time for both sides. :|
  • 11
    Why couldn't you call the client and get the information?
  • 8
    @KDSBest Valid question. There are bosses that want all the client's communication to go through them. He was one of them. (We are talking small company, 4 devs, a small customer stock here.)

    This can be valid approach, esp. in regards to avoid feature creep, as sometimes customer broaden the scope and the developer trying to be nice implements stuff they aren't paid for.

    Yet it can also be very frustrating if the managers doesn't push information but you have to constantly pull. And by pull I mean an async pull. Only getting back a Promise of information. With high chance of it getting rejected during the waiting time.
  • 9
    ++ for starting days at 0
  • 3
    That column was in an excel fucking spreadsheet wasn't it?

    I hate excel based project management.
  • 0
    I fucking hate that kind of person, it feels like they are running a very old pentium or something in their heads!
  • 2
    @jmacmi2 Nope, it was trello :) That worked out quite well in the team to be honest. It was hour agile board.

    Shame that agile was synonymous to chaos ^^
  • 1
    @k0pernikus ahh thank fuck for Trello... all hail Trello, killer of spreadsheets!

    I'm just wrangling my org to use Trello for stuff they use spreadsheets for at the moment.

    Dude, I call it fr-agile, because everyone has their subset of agile, if it barely works... I use fragile as the term.

    My company has implemented a similar fragile development process... like, they're agile, but where's my waterfall plan!? How can you expect us to fund you without knowing exactly what you're doing every hour for the next 2 months!?
  • 0
    @k0pernikus man sorry, Was Lucky never had this kinda issue in 10+ years now.
Add Comment