End of day...

[alexpgp]

This morning, I indirectly mentioned how the translation phase of a project often gets "squeezed" when people fail to meet milestones in advance of some can't-put-it-off event. My "favorite" horror story in this regard involved materials developed to support John Blaha's flight aboard the Mir station back in '97.

I recall there being a hard-wired deadline of April 30 of that year for the completion (including the translation) of something like 600 pages of material in preparation for Blaha's mission. The initial delivery schedule was predicated on an intense, but doable translation effort. I seem to recall the job would cover about two weeks and would involve a team of translators and editors. No problem.

Then the people originating the material found they needed more time, and their delivery schedule began to slip. A few days here, a weekend there, then another few days, and so on.

But management still expected the final translated product to be delivered by April 30.

In the end, the document originators finally delivered their material on April 28, and despite numerous communications/entreaties/hints/calls for panic/etc. that had taken place as the delivery schedule slipped, management was dumbfounded as to why the final product could not be ready by April 30.

In the end, of course, the translation was not ready by April 30, and I'll let you guess where people tried to pin the blame. (Key word in previous sentence: tried.)

I suspect the underlying cause of this phenomenon is indirectly related to why so many people find themselves driving to the post office at 11:45 pm on April 15.

A fairly sizeable job did come in just short of noon, and I managed to send it off about 90 minutes or so ago. All 6,600 words of it.

Limbo is still limbo, but from all indications, I'd have much better odds drawing to an inside straight.

In the end, it was a good day.

They all are. You just can't let yourself be sidetracked.

Cheers...

Comments

[skipperja.livejournal.com]

Cheers for a good day!

Systems testing is similar; probably most jobs are. When your on the tail-end of an operation, you're expected to take up the slack. We usually weren't right up against a flight schedule though. We could usually count on a slip in the flight schedule.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

The tail end may be expected to take up the slack, but no sane organization relies on that happening, in my opinion, in the sense that management says one thing at the start of a project with the knowledge that it's a bunch of hokum, and that their panicked cries later represent reality.

I seem to recall our deadline was something like 5 months in front of Blaha's launch date, which means that something else got shorted downstream of us. Perhaps someone took a pencil to time spent training on some of the lesser payloads.

Cheers...