2024-01-24 Wednesday - Signs You Might Be On A Death March Project

[image credit: hgenthe on pixabay.com]

 

Today's meditation:

Signs you might be on a "Death March" project...

• Scope increases by a multiple [n] (where [n] > 1, and [n] is quite often an integer), but time and resources stay the same.

• The number of REQUIRED [r] productive hours that must be expended per day, to maintain the schedule, is greater than AVAILABLE hours [a]: where the number of MANDATORY [m] hours spent in meetings - is subtracted from the possible WORKING hours [w]...

Such that, [a] = [w] - [m], and [r] > [a], with [a] approaching zero, as TIME [t] progresses.

 

Other possible signs...

• Management cancels all vacations through the end of the year.
• Management mandates staff must work weekends.
• Management states that working 4am-9pm is expected
• When there are no more slots available between 8am-6pm - meetings begin to be scheduled at 7am, 6am, 5am, 4am...or 8pm, 9pm, 10pm, 11pm, ...
• You find  yourself regularly working at 1am to complete status reports (2 days after they are due) - because that is the only time period you could find, where you had sufficient capacity to focus on that task... 
• You don't have any time to perform QA on the work that is being performed.
• The work products being produced are a [3] on a [1-10] scale - due to lack of sufficient time to do quality work.
  
• Management refuses to accept the estimates provided by staff - and simply picks delivery dates. 
• There is no time to do actual work - because staff are in meetings 90%+ of the time. 
• There is no "Think Time"
• There is no reserve capacity in the team to handle spikes in demand.
  
• New work is continually being added - with no additional time, or resources, added. 
• You spend more time in status meetings, than in working meetings. 
• Requirements are constantly changing - with no additional time, or resources, added. 
• The Gantt chart looks like a wall of logs stacked to the ceiling, with the finish dates all aligning on the right side - and everything is showing GREEN...until the last minute, and then suddenly goes RED.
• Workload is projected to increase by 400%, and yet 75% of staff is to be eliminated.
• You don't have time to eat breakfast.
• You don't have time to eat lunch.
• You don't have time for any exercise. 
• You don't have time during working hours for bio breaks.
• Frequently there is zero slack time between meetings - all day long. 
• Management has purposefully understaffed the team - and expects the team will work nights and weekends (as a standard operating model) - to make-up for the capacity shortfall.