4 posts tagged “project”

So, by now, the whole of Vox is aware that my degree is wrapping up, and that it depends on a team collaboration in which we build a piece of software for a client.

Well.  Throughout the whole thing, we've had a team member who just hasn't pulled his weight. (If you're reading this, you either know who you are, or you're going to get told by 3pm today in front of the Lecturer-In-Charge, with whom I've had a number of conversations about you.) His name is Ben.  I know a few Bens, so no, this isn't the one who forgot me recently, this is another one.  He has had 0 assignments left for his semester for the last week.  Every other team member has at least 1 and probably 2 due this week.  It's a part of why I haven't been blogging recently (expect that to change after Friday, when boredom will set in really quickly.)  now, recently, we figured out this guy was useless. I actually can't remember if I've blogged about him or not yet.  I've emailed the lecturer a couple of times asking for some advice. 
Well.  We (foolishly) said (nicer, but it's basically what we said) "well, you've done -no- implementation, here's a chance to do some documentation and regain some marks.  Would you be happy to do the general user manual?" 
"Sure, no worries" says Ben the Terminally Lazy.
"Cool, you need to do this this and this"
"No dramas"
and we were set. the rest of us actually had some time to work on our assignments since Ben was doing things.  Thursday rolled around.  "So, what have you done?"
"this this and this" says Ben.
"Cool, can we see it?" queries my lovely self in the sweetest, most non-threatening voice I can muster
"I'd have to go home to get it" responds Ben.  My urge to kill rose.
"Ok, well can you email it out when you get home?"
"oh, I don't know that it's ready tonight to send out" urge to kill: rising, subtext: I've done nothing.
"All I want is something so that I know what sort of material we're supposed to produce"
"Yeah, no worries"
"so can you send it out tomorrow?" Says I.
"I reckon"
and the conversation ended there.

Friday rolls around: nothing.

Saturday: nothing from ben, but Darren has produced templates because he was so sick of waiting, and a response from Ben saying "we don't need to use templates beacuse tehre will still be formatting differences and we'd need to reformat them anyway." at 12:30AM on Sunday I send an email asking for something so that I can take a look at to see what Ben wants us to write since he's collating the General User Manual.

An email came through to me (and me alone) at 11:08 AM Sunday morning with just over a page of text, a significant proportion of it bullet points. none of which I would deem sufficient for submission.
I forwarded this on to everyone since I worked out that I actually had nothing that I needed to contribute to that manual myself. then at 11:57AM, he sends out another one with a couple more paragraphs.  It was obvious that he'd been writing it that morning so he'd have something to send.

and eventually, I got the Times that Ben wanted me to use to update the project schedule.  He'd broken it up into sections. and his highest time was for presentation!  (I think I may have ranted about ben not wanting to come to an important meeting before)  He almost didn't come to the really important meetings about the presentation where we produce the thing, and it's only because I was nasty and said that it was disloyal, disrespectful and hurtful of him to decide not to come to what was arguably one of the most important meetings of the semester that he came!  His highest time! 2nd highest? meetings. yep, you heard me, meetings. I was appalled. I was disgusted. I was horrified.  and then I read the time he put down for the first instance of "user docs/manuals" 75 minutes.  my voice went black, and I did Death's voice. you know the one. THE ONE WHERE HE TALKS LIKE THIS.  I said something along the lines of "I'M GOING TO KILL HIM!"  and I continued reading.  I found User Manuals: 475 minutes.  Better. It would of course have been lovely if we had seen anything at all that suggested that he'd done anything like that much work.  On seeing those times, I started printing things.

• The "manual" he sent to me
• The "manual" he sent to everyone else
• The email Darren said that he was sick of waiting. (Darren's single section was longer than Ben's "manual" by the way)
• The Times that Ben sent me
• The email where Darren tells me that he doesn't believe there's a template.
• The email where Ben says that there's no point to a template.

I figure that will give me plenty to talk about in our management meeting at 2.40pm Monday 15 Oct.

and right now, I have something to say to Ben:
"Dear Ben,

This is going to shock you.  You're used to me being a nice person who is easy to get along with.  And, by and large, I think (I definitely hope) that you're right.  I mean, I'm a bitch, for sure, but who isn't?  This letter, however... This letter is a result of me being so nice and easy to get along with.  I didn't rant at you for not doing your work when I probably should have.  You've seen that I can play dirty, tweaking emotions when I need to.  Right now, I need to rant, I need to play dirty.  I need to write something so that if you ever do read it, you'll understand how I feel. I need to at least write about how I feel about you before I see you tomorrow.  So that when I see you in that management meeting, I don't absolutely blow my stack and lose all my professionalism marks.  With that said, here is what I have to say.  I know it's not pretty, but it's the truth.

I don't know what you thought project was going to be like.  I knew it was going to be hard work, and chew up a lot of my time.  That's why I didn't take an extra (overtime), completely optional unit in second semester even though I wasn't already failing units multiple times over. I would never attempt to do that uni load and work 2 jobs.  I actually quite liked you at the start of the year.  I figured you were a good student and a decent guy.  I don't understand how you can spend so much on uni tuition and not put in the effort.  I don't understand how you can be happy just failing. 

What I do understand? I understand that helping you pass cheapens the degree I'm working fucking hard to get.  I've already had one person pass for a qualification based almost entirely on my work.  I am not doing that again.  I understand that you need to get 45% of your internal mark to pass this unit, which is a core unit to obtain a computing degree.  I understand that you have done almost no work this semester, and there is virtually no tangible evidence that you have done anything.  I understand that your Work Product Pay Packet will be as close to Zero as I can make it and still have a clear conscience.  I understand that I am not going to sit idly by while you cheapen my profession.

What you need to understand?  You need to understand that in my eyes you have failed. You didn't pull your weight, wouldn't tell us you weren't doing things, and every time we bailed you out because it's better the devil you know, and we were understanding of workloads and stuff.  Well, no more.  As far as I'm concerned, your individual marks will be nil, nix, nada, zilch.  I don't know that I'll ever be gutsy enough to say this to your face,  but in the year I've known you, you have become contemptible to me. 

I'm sure you'll enjoy repeating project and making some other team miserable.  Thinking about that almost makes me want to let you pass.  It's not an experience I would wish on anyone.  But then, I wouldn't wish you on an employer either.

I'll see you around, I'm sure, because I start Honours next year, and you're still going to be around."

I'm sorry, everyone.  That venomous type/rant/vent/cry has saved me from actually going psycho on his arse, I think.  (I'm still not going to risk it, I'll leave the sharp objects in my locker before the meeting)  I hate feeling like that.  I hate feeling like I'm dishing out what people deserve. This post may not be pretty... but it's true for me.

Well! we got assessed right before I was due to start my shift, so that was a relief.  Just as I was starting, the TAFE Cotingent arrived, including one face I shall never forget, Henry Bush, Teacher extraordinaire of the TAFE Diploma Courses and all units Programming.

I have a number of Screenshots!

is today!

We have a big bowl full of lollies to give away, more lollies if those ones run out. I have my business cards to hand out when I'm on. We also have our incredibly sexy my.plan system, (I don't know how we managed to make "my.plan" funky, sexy and enticing, but I think we did!) (glory be to me, who fixed the design as necessary, and to Tom, who rewrote the categories section to include the new design) with its swipe card login and user-tailored interface, and now we need to demonstrate it to the public in general.  Tom and Darren are first, then Emma replaces Tom, Then I replace Darren, and finally Ben replaces Emma.  (We each have a 1-2 hour shift)  we have awesome Team Trainer T shirts with the Trainer logo (A big "T") embroidered on them, along with "<Team Trainer>" and our names.  Yay for my mother-in-law with her many embroidery machines!  I'm feeling really confident and pleased with how things are turning out.  It's all pretty much going according to plan.  I think it's time for my coffee though.  I'll blog about how it went, and I'm -definitely- taking screen shots to put up here soon.

I'm so happy, my hair looks decent, I have parking all paid for until well after Demo Day ends, when all is said and done, I'm feeling awesome, I even got a good night's sleep last night.

If you're local, drop by and see me! School of Computing, uTas Launceston, Newnham Campus, just follow the arrows in the SoC and you'll find us.

Love you all,
D

Well, some of you may already know, but just in case you don't, my Software Engineering Project is with a local casino/country club.  they're really big on having their stuff look just so.  fine, no problem.  The rub is that after we designed this interface (which we hated too, so no dramas) they said tehyd go and hire someone to redesign.  well, they eventually did. a fortnight or so ago.

on Monday, I called the designer with the CCT HR Dept's (Commissioner of our project) sayso, to find out what was going on with the designs etc.  he emailed some pictures through, and there are issues.

I think most of these stem from the fact that he hasn't spoken to anyone initially connected to the project.  Not to HR, not to us, the dev team.  he's spoken to Marketing, who have spoken to HR, who have spoken to us.and we're not sure how much he spoke with marketing.  There are a couple though, which any designer should see as an issue:

1. White text on fluoro lime button.  completely unreadable. the white on powder blue button is almost as bad.
2. the "general level" content pane draws attention away from the "detailed" content pane.
3. 2 is because the "general level" content pane is not only visible when the detailed content pane is, but also the fact that the detailed content pane takes up approx 1/6 of the screen, compared to the "general level" one at almost 1/3
4. 3 results in the text in the detailed pane being fairly small, causing issues for the up to 60/70 year olds that are supposed to be able to access the system (I can't remember the age offhand) simply not being able to read the information.
5. the "Create Booking" screen is almost nice, except for the colour he chose to use, I know it's the colour in their logo, their logo looks good, but that's because their logo is -small-.khaki-gold in large quantities looks, well, crappy
   

Now, there are a couple things which should be clarified (read: fixed) in a meeting tomorrow between HR, Myself, Designer, and Marketing which we only decided we should have at about 3:30 this arvo.  The HR person I talk to identified these operational issues as well, which is a relief.

1. This is a training booking package.  not (currently) a recruitment tool, and although it wouldn't be hard to adapt it and add that module in, it shouldn't have a link to "positions vacant" just yet.
2. The organisational structure of the site is supposed to be that courses are linked via jobs.  ie, "What job do you want? Oh, you need to do Course X,Y,and Z"  he's separated courses and jobs into separate tabs on his "general content" pane. basically destroying almost all linkage between job and course, (he does provide a link to courses via the detailed pane though) 
   

I'll show you some pictures once I know for sure that these ones aren't going to be used in the real deal.  We like the overall look+Feel, but there are just a couple of things that need fixing. Some of those are just colours (actually, they're all just colours... these are photoshopped guis) but seeing as these pics are basically our style-guide, everyone needs to be happy with them.