Post #4063105

We had a nice long departmental presentation on level-of-rigor and process issues today. We're being ratcheted to release work with a higher level of rigor and accountability than is practicable given the level of completeness and certainty of the design info we use. Do more unaccounted-for admin work on the same schedule & budget. The only way out seems to be to maliciously comply and issue calcs with a higher degree of certainty but log every single missing or TBD parameter supplied by other groups as Open Items (we explicitly track technical 'debt'). This will freak out some of management because they want to overconstrain the problem to get more certainty and fewer Open Items on the seme schedule. There are consequences to setting aggressive policy and schedule like this with no change to work practice. Fast, cheap, right - pick no more than one. This isn't petty or vindictive, it's honest. Certain software cannot provide the detail and fidelity expected for some work. Do what we can, but log every scrap of data we need but we don't have and show them the effect of their policy. Don't like it? - fill our open reqs, sort out why other departments can't or won't hand over data we need. Anyway, you can't get blood from a stone and actions have consequences. So I'm laying out a few plans to tackle our problems with weak design data and hopefully cut down on the time reviews take to prep and review. Tedious but it has to happen.