Since I was officially off my last project on the 15th, I’m gonna blog about some of the issues and lessons learned.  I will replace names where necessary, although I may drop a real name or two.  

This is part 1 of 5.

The Project: An Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system that will be sold commercially (at least that’s their hope) by the client.

The Players (names have been changed):
Stan – the PM/BA
Bob – the tech lead
Mike (me) - a developer
John – a developer
Jake – the Subject Matter Expert (SME) / client
Jeff – the UI designer
Peter - a manager

I will also talk about other people, but I’ll simply use their titles (CEO, President, etc.).

This project, although not well defined when I started, had a deadline for pilot already set.  Go figure.  That deadline was…..c’mon….guess?  Yep.  June 15th.

The first meeting I attended scared the hell out of me.  It was the first day on the project for me, Stan and John.  BTW, all of us were new to the consulting company as well as the project.  In fact, when I attended the meeting, I was still waiting for the consulting company to send me the final contract, but after that meeting, I almost didn’t sign it.  I had a long talk with the consulting recruiter but in the end, really needed the gig and decided I could deal with 6 months of pain.

The client consisted of a father and son plus some investors (one of whom was the CEO for the consulting company we all worked for), but for the most part, the son (Jake) was our primary contact.  I will say that when the father and son were in the same room, the meetings got pretty heated.

At this early stage of the project the client had some idea of what they wanted, but nothing concrete.  In the two weeks preceding my involvement in the project, the tech lead and the client had engaged in “Plan and Define” sessions.  The result of these meetings were several horrible flow charts that Bob had put together along with a list of “tasks” and I think there was even an initial “iteration release plan” (basically, what pieces of functionality fit into each release).

What I found funny is that when one of the clients’ initial “great ideas” was presented to real end-users, they told the client it was a stupid idea.  Gotta love end-users, especially when they’re physicians.

Anyway, the first meeting completely scared me because there was no way in hell we were gonna get a fraction of what they wanted done by the deadline, but it didn’t matter.  The original tech lead had already said we could do it, but a dirty secret about the tech lead would soon come to light that would change everything.  Anyway, the client WANTED IT ALL and didn’t want to hear anything about dropping functionality or changing the date.

So, there we were, a rough list of features, a deadline and a team that had never worked together before.  Little did I know how bad things would get in the coming weeks and months.