Plan-Making Plans in Trichotomy

Middle management

Two weeks I gave a presentation on the design of our project. It was well received, but the implementation is going to take over a year to finish. The managers want this implemented as soon as possible and are pushing to cut its scope.

This project is needed for some immediate contract, so it makes sense to get it out the door quickly, but our tech lead wants to make the project usable for other projects too. So we end up designing something that is flexible enough to accommodate potential additional users. So now our project design is more complicated than it needed to be.

Now the higher up is breathing down our neck to get the contract delivered quickly, so now we’re going back to designing for the contract.

This is getting to be a pattern; the management has a vision or a plan, and our tech lead doesn’t want to deliver just that requirement, but rather some hypothetical potential requirements. That bumps up the development time, and then management comes down on us.

I am feeling burnt-out. I’ve been at this team for 3 years, so I’ve been looking around to switch teams now.

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Second in-person concert

The second in-person concert went well, but there were only 6 groups performing. A pattern is emerging: with the online scheduler, a concert gets filled up a few months in advance (right now the December concert only has 3 minutes left on it, and a few weeks ago the November concert had 6), however, a few weeks before the concert date, people would back out.

Two weeks before the last concert, it still had 9 performers, but 3 groups dropped out at the last moment. The recital tool has a mechanism to “lock in” the performance roster so people can’t just unschedule themselves, so ENT is now making use of that feature. He’s already locked November’s concert.

I think we should have overbooked the concerts and expect people to drop out. If they don’t, we could always shorten the intermission.

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Get away

La Professeure and I are looking to take a vacation but are still worried about Covid. We initially looked into cruising to the Bahamas or Caribbean for warm weather, so we don’t have to fly, but she changed her mind after thinking about being on a cruise ship. I actually think we’d be safer on a ship full of vaccinated people than the resort we went to in the summer with people of… questionable vaccination status, but I guess there’s always a stigma against cruise ships.

So now we are looking to vacation somewhere with a vaccination requirement. That is slim pickings. We still don’t want to fly, so we most likely would end up in a ski resort or B&B. So, no warm weather for us.

We definitely need the break, I just don’t know when it’ll be.

• N