Months ago they put me on a project, a sort of focus group. They call it a HOT Group, for no real reason (and it doesn’t even stand for anything). So since early October we’ve been taking time each week to huddle in a room deciding how to change our process for some documentation crap.

Now, there was very much a need to change this particular process. This is something that a bunch of teams have to deal with on a weekly basis, and it’s very much a problem. It’s a document that the project manager controls, and every last PM (especially the frogman PMs) has their own sort of style. That translates into wildly different levels of detail and, in the end, screws everyone up as we try to translate it. So we had to come up with a standard.

In the very first meeting the facilitator handed out a workflow diagram and said “I’m told this is what you’re using now.” Of course it wasn’t: nobody in the room had ever seen it before, and we certainly hadn’t actually experienced it. It was planned that we’d jump right in, but instead we had to take a couple of weeks to go back and define what the process really is.

Anyway, down this long road we’ve had the deadline pushed back a few times, until today. Today I and the rest of the team get to do a presentation to the CIO and a handful of other lesser executives. Fun.

I’ve ranted a bit about this before, and it hasn’t really been pleasant. As they extended the deadline it went straight into the busiest times of the year for all of us. This week is going to be the quietest since the beginning of November, so we had more time… but of course after this week all the execs will be out for vacation. It’ll be good to be done with this. I’m sick to death of it.