Worst Type of IT Projects
I am sure that many of you have worked on the IT projects from hell. However, here are some of the worst type of IT projects that I have worked on.
1) Where you are not only the sole IT contractor on the project, but you‘re the first contractor that they‘ve ever had at the company. They keep on starting sentences with ‘For the money we pay you’. They say condescendingly every so often ‘I don‘t think I could work just for money’.
2) Where the project manager likes to impose his or her dominance on the project. He likes to sack someone every so often to ‘encourage the others‘.
3) Where they tell you that you would be a Project Leader using .Net or Java on the project, but you actually end up being a bog standard developer doing maintenance on their Vax Basic or Cobol system.
4) Where they don’t allow any talking. Also, the boss‘ arranges his or her desk like a schoolteacher‘s, so he or she can catch any signs that two of the project developers might be wasting company time by talking. He or she definitely doesn’t allow laughing, and smiling is a danger signal.
Deadlines Cut Short
5) Where the deadlines for each piece of work have been cut, in the hope that you‘ll work faster.
The original deadlines, even before they were cut, were garbage anyway. This is because the people making the estimates at the company don‘t know the productivity on previous projects. They don’t know the normal productivity for the tools used. Also, their ‘scientific’ estimating method is just ‘ten days for this, five for that’.
6) When you have to hide the fact that you are late, because of the tight deadlines, and you have to allocate time on your weekly time sheet update to tasks that you have hardly started. This is to disguise the fact that you are late.
Each week it gets harder and harder to hide the fact that you are behind schedule. This is bad for your work satisfaction and morale. You may then give up your work for testing before you are completely satisfied with it. That will just be the beginning of your troubles.
7) Where corners are cut and no proper development methodology is used. Every experienced member of the project knows that it is going down the pan, well before the project management and the senior management do.
Working Late Hours on Project
8) Those worst type of projects where you have to work late hours constantly, for no extra pay as a permanent employee, or for single time as a contractor.
The reason that the project is late is down to management‘s inability to estimate, garner the requirements, change manage, track the project and to co-ordinate it properly. However, it is you who have to do all the grunt work late into the evening to compensate.
9) Where you find out late into the contract or project that your agency is taking 30%, 40% or even 50% of all the money that the company is paying for your services.
10) Where they make it known to you at the beginning, that only three of the ten contractors on the project will be kept on for the next phase – and the whole of the contract social hour (and some of the work hours) are spent by the contractors trying to work out between themselves who the three are currently likely to be.
I‘m sure that there are loads of other worst type of IT projects. If anyone wants to make a list, please send it to us and we may publish it. Or just put it in the Comments section below.
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