How should one pointy-haired boss deal with his own PHB?
I meant, do a 75% decent job on each hour chunk, but when the hour is up, move to the next chunk. Don’t bog down, and don’ procrastinate. The name of the game is forward progress. Turn is something that is a little crappy tomorrow afternoon, and Boss think that you finished it, but he’s not lookuing at it closely until Monday, which gives you a cahnce to work all weekend, and come in monday morning and say “Hey, I was thinking about the project and I came up with some refinements. Review this, and ignore what I gave you on Friday.” This is not school. You don’t have to get an A+. Given your situation, shoot for a B- by tomorraw and work over the weekend.
I could be wrong (and it’s too bad that the OP is anon), but I bet that the project costs aren’t completely based on labor costs and that there’s a large fixed cost portion of the project. It’s probably something like setting up a 24k server on a network and configure it to do X, Y, and Z. My suggestion, come clean with the PHB and let them know that the project is out of your expertise. Make them choose what your priorities should be: A. Dive into the nebulous project and get a better idea of what it will actually take to complete, with the consequence of neglecting your other work, or… 2. Keep all your other projects below, and take your time working on the nebulous project. Keeping this kind of thing in the dark is only going to cause frustration and pain for everyone. If you work at a company where the truth isn’t accepted and valued, hopefully you work in a field that it’s easy to find a new job.
He constantly assigns me other (higher priority) projects which crowd the monster project out, which have meant that there is never any uninterrupted block of time to allocate to this project. When the master demands the servant begin a new task, and the servant is still busy about the previous task, the servant replies: Boss, is this new task more important than project X? I can start on it right away, but it will make project X late. This is called “managing upwards.” Now for the really cynical part. He says it’s really important, but keeps assigning you new stuff, and hasn’t thus far complained of its lateness. My conclusion is that despite what he says, it isn’t really that important. If it was, you’d be fired already. Rather, you work for the kind of wanker who thinks they will get more out of you by saying everything is extremely urgent. The correct counter is to stress just how hard you are working, but be as late in delivery as you need to be. He doesn’t really want it done tom
I see a couple of solutions: Short-term: Develop easy extras that will please the boss, making it value-added. “It’ll take more time, but you’ll get [extras]”. Then the boss can toot his horn about it to whoever is wanting this work. Long-term: I smell a pay raise. If they’ve got $100K to throw at this stuff, surely they’ll consider paying a lot less for something developed inhouse that might take more time. Plus they could assign another person to help. This is how some departments (and department heads) get started. The expertise issue may become manageable after a bit of spinup time.
Anon says: The original project was $100 k approx for an outside consultancy to come up with a new design for an application. We decided to hire a consultant for a few weeks at about $20 k instead, over my objections. When the consultant left, he had left all the design mockups in one big pile along with all the old ones in a prototyping tool, all in one prototype. This meant I had to go through and extract all the final ideas, and delete all the old ideas, while leaving the prototype working. Kind of like looking for the few lego pieces you need, in a big pile of lego pieces. Bear in mind that I have never used this prototyping tool before. Once upon a time, I was technical, but not anymore (I am a neo-PHB now! 🙂 ) I pulled an all-nighter on Thu night. I had a much better idea of what’s left by Fri am. Met with PHB on Fri pm. Meeting went something like this: Me: I need to tell you about project X. It’s going to take at least two more days without interruptions. PHB: {Raised eyebrows
