Mhzjunkie <
[email protected]> Thou flipper. Thou false fiend. Thou
poisonous slave. Thou poisonous bunch-backed toad. Ye radiated and ye
modulated:
If you deliver a product to a fixed, immovable date and if you're off
track to meet that immovable date by even a little amount of time
then something must give way. Usually notions of cost, quality and
scope necessarily get shot out the window until you catch up. That's
if you ever catch up.
Those familiar with Covey's 4 Quadrant urgent/important prioritising
process will know that once you're in a stamp-out-the-fires mode then
you're in a vicious cycle that requires a lot of mental and physical
energy to break out of. Microsoft's idea of not urgent and not
important is totally fux0red. For example...
A common way of managing bugs is to triage them. Because the
excessively buggy Vista was being delivered to a fixed date and not
to any apparent cost, quality or scope criteria, the triage rule
applied by Microsoft to Vista bugs had to be something along the
lines of "If you don't see the ****er crash the PC into a smoking
blob of melted metal and silicon, it's not serious enough to worry
about before we release this piece of shit."
Microsoft never learn. They apply the same triage rule to all their
product releases when they're hitting the wall with fixed delivery
dates. It's woefully bad project management on Microsoft's part.
Quality is surely a term only bandied about in Microsoft by the
Microsoft Marketing Borg merely because it sounds like a good word to
use; and quality is surely an unknown concept in most of Microsoft's
independent delivery silos that don't ever talk to each other, which
explains why Vista on the desktop ended up with features for laptops
prominently displayed on the Start menu where the desktop features
should have been.
November 30, 2006 was Microsofts immutable release date for no less
than 30 products, some of them very high-profile business suites.
That fixed date included Vista being released to MSDN subscribers and
business & corporate users. The cost of Vista is measured in
multiples of billions of US dollars. Vista features were descoped
faster than a toothless, old whore can get her knickers up and down
for a quick $2 flash of her scabby crotch, and the "quality" of Vista
speaks for itself.
Microsoft are unable to line up their cost, scope and quality ducks,
yet they release products against immutable dates, which necessarily
entails lined up ducks.
Fixed delevery date --> ducks not lined up ---> stamp out fires --->
rip out features ---> escalating cost ---> the death of quality --->
release debacle --->
It's a familair pattern at Microsoft, but they never see it.
