What was the first fucking thing I say?! Should’ve listened to me SUCKAAAAAASS!!! It has been 4 months since we were first told about the Data Cleansing project, and finally, they’ve put out project plan 1.0, with what I had originally proposed on the first fucking day… HA!!! What did I tell ya?!! SUCKAAAAASSS!!! :)) LOL Here’s how the story goes… in Sept.‘05, my manager and our relatively new Business Analyst (B.A.) pulled us into a meeting to tell us that, finally, the Data Cleansing project is about to start and we’ll be responsible for it. Great!! My manager gave a brief sum-up of what has happened on the CRMS migration (upgrade) project so far. The key things I’ve learned from that meeting were 1) We’ll be buying data from D&B. 2) Data Conversion team will come up with the migration logic to “put current data into correct places in future system”. 3) We will be responsible for cleaning the data so that we can feed the future system with clean / meaningful data. Now, what was my first statement on “what to do”? I said: “We need to know about Data Conversion’s stuff. We should look at what their logic is, where they pull those data from, and do our cleansing against that set of data.” MADE PERFECT SENSE, YAH? What did they say? “No, we don’t need to know their stuff, we just clean everything!”
Since then, I’ve raised my objection at least 3 more times, each time our B.A. and managers reaffirmed that we shouldn’t limit ourselves with Data Conversion’s stuff, we should clean everything. So what happened? Our extremely creative B.A. went and came up with some truly spectacular projects - like “get all dinstinct values for all editable fields in CRMS”… shit that wasted a lot of my time, working late nights to pull him the data he needed to support his imagination. As expected, his spectacular projects were met with spectacular failures each time when he presented to the other teams in meetings. He got his ass handed to him every time, and it pissed me off b’coz what I’ve been saying were right! Somehow though, he continued to believe that he was on the right track and he “owns” the desgin process. The end result was a big arguement that took place after one meeting where he had just presented his “solution” to account merges - a spreadsheet with like 50+ columns that would show how accounts were merged together. Obvioulsy, it was shot down in the meeting, I don’t understand how some people can make up so much bull shit. “Why aren’t more people interrigent, rike me!” LOL… I was so deep into his bull shit that I had completely lost sight of the big picture. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… “Bad managers severely limit other people’s productivity”. Like how my B.A. was limiting me to work with senseless things that he had created. The turning point came when some product manager from the corporation office in Sunnyvale had some high level questions about the goals and “expected results”… our B.A. couldn’t confirm the answer and he let the corporate product manager ask me directly… that’s when I finally got the break and think broader and deeper into the situation. (Those high level questions helped push me to create the solution.) I had to ignore the B.A.’s spreadsheet (and pretty much anything that his creative juice produced). With clear understanding of the project goals and end results, I synced up with the Data Conversion team, and was finally able to create the heart of this project… the complete process of Input/Output to feed and receive data to/from Data Conversion. (That’s why in the beginning, I said we need to know about Data Conversion’s stuff… it’s coz we need to feed them with clean data! I was right!!!) With this solid, technical piece created, I was finally able to stand firm and said “No dude! Look, here it is! I’ve created the entire process. THIS IS THE SOLUTION. THIS IS WHAT WE NEED TO DO.” Just last week, we were able to formalize the project plan. The B.A. still writes the stuff, and it still has a lot of bull shit, but at least the “heart” of it all was written by me, and hence the process, even the spreadsheet output, now makes sense. He was able to present it to upper management and for the first time, got the approval. Today, we had our first “Thursday Data Conversion Meeting” in which everyone had looked at the plan and said it was good. :D LOL! ALL THANKS TO ME!!! God I’m good!