Once upon a time, I worked at a company as a project engineer where the sales people frequently didn?t pass sales orders down to application engineering for 2-3 months (no one knows why). So, sitting in a planning meeting with my boss, my counterparts, and other middle managers from the other relevant departments, we would plan out when customer delivery would occur. And to everyone?s horror, we would project, for many orders, a delay of one quarter.
Solution? Go back and make wild assumptions as to when things would have to occur to come within a few weeks after the target FAT date.
Of course, being new at this and na?ve, I would ask if this was really feasible. Upon leaving the meeting, my boss reprimanded me saying "By your question, you just called everybody a liar."
Result? When the customer came for FAT, we would have to jury rig the system to appear to be "working" and then pray we could get it working for SAT. Of course delivery was way late, and we ended having to do both development and testing onsite at the customer?s site (not pretty). Project manager, as always, is the one holding the bag. Customer, as always, was way pissed off.
Moral. Sometimes the problem is not the project managers or QA.
Discussion on:
Message 3 of 1
The best of ZDNet, delivered
ZDNet Newsletters
Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox
