Filibuster

The project board took a discussion on goals for the year. That's late, since this is April, it was ill-prepared, and it was rushed. Nevertheless, this was progress.

The discussion was nearly derailed by the head of the project, Len, repeatedly making the same detail point over and over again. The chair of the meeting started reading his email. The person presenting that item switched the screen to the cricket scores.

I said loudly "we only have 15 minutes left, and without decisions on this item I don't know what assignments to give the developers from the start of May". The meeting resumed. Most of the work packages were labeled A, but there were enough Bs and Cs to give me something to work with.

After the meeting Len said to me "I resent you putting pressure on me to take those decisions."

I find that truly bizarre as a way of speaking to someone who works for you. I reminded him that I had been asking for these decisions since July last year.

The meeting showed some other progress too. We used to be divided between people who think we are doing great and people who think everything is terrible. Now we seem to be agreed on a balanced assessment of the project.

For the current release there was a beta test. I wrote a form with tick boxes, and one user returned it, ticked to say that after some specified fixes, the release is fit for use.