One of the tasks of the dodekathlon, or the Labours of Herakles, was to clean the Augean stables in a single day. Shoveling through the minutiae of what I termed ‘The 50 Foot Document’ in the last post seems to be a comparable task – and neither I, nor my co-worker in this are Herakles. Strangely, I recently used the analogy of the ‘Hydra’ of my clients customer snapping at the ‘Cerberus‘ of their customer. Makes me wonder about asking after a toga dress code.
I did manage to explain my position on one of the documents, have it understood and accepted, and therefore was able to complete the update of one document this week. It is now fed into the maw of the configuration management process.
And during the work on this documentation, we were asked to add more documents to the list, each of which being more important than spending the time on the design process itself.
This morning I became nostalgic for the short period of time where I was able to apply a modified version of the Agile management process known as the scrum to product delivery. During that time I had almost adequate resources and we were able to design and build (and minimally document) a product then test and deliver it. Starting off greatly behind schedule we were able to deliver it only somewhat late – making up a lot of schedule in the process.
Considering the changes made after that delivery, it must not have been profitable.
What is there to learn from this? I will think about this some.
Maybe I’ll document it.
