500 Words — Day Eighteen: Waterfalls
One thing that I have learned while working for the government is that they really like waterfalls. Now, I’m not talking about the physical dumping of water from one ledge into the river below. I’m talking about the model that our government engineers love to plan around and attempt to implement. It comes as no surprise that a lot of products that come out of this engineering process are millions of dollars over budget and months overdue. But why is that? Well, its because people can not make up their damn minds in the time allotted.
How does waterfall work? First someone near the top of an organization comes up with some idea that will begin a breath of fresh innovation to the military industrial complex. They have fat pockets of taxpayer dollars and then start reaching out to their contacts to find some group of engineers and researchers that is working in some related area. It is very likely that this group of engineers and researcher are lacking in funds. There is even a good possibility that they need money to finish their last project which has destroyed their last budget and schedule. This money is heaven sent. The expected delivery date is two years away. Why don’t we take it? We’re almost done* with this project and after we finish we’ll take the lessons we learned and do waterfall the right way this time!
After a few meetings, handshakes, and some really boring PowerPoint presentations littered with acronyms that if read out sound like some completely foreign language, we start the waterfall. Our lovely team of engineers that isn’t busy trying to fix the defects that keep popping up on the last project start discussions with their sponsor to hash out the concept and requirements. Of course, organization bigshot describes some vague ambitious idea that sounds great at some government conference at 11PM after three or four drinks and the engineers get to work drafting the requirements. Since the concept is kind of vague, they struggle and kind of put it off and help out on putting out the fires on the last project.
Just like that six months have past and the sponsor visits for an update and expects a preliminary design to be in place. Our poor engineering team is still fixing the last major issues with the last project and after a few 10 hour days, they come up with some requirements that vaguely relate to the vague concept and they come up with a half baked design in half of a week. One really experienced guy takes a look at some of the old slide decks and sprinkles their update PowerPoint with those lovely acronyms the sponsors seem to love. The sponsor nods his head up and down (and almost falls asleep about three hours into the update) and voices his approval at their project. He looks forward to their full design in six months.
Fast forward six months and the last project has just finished completing those last tests. Everything seemed good to go, but the team needed to build a last second workaround component because of some design fault. That projects to take a month, but then they will finally be done. Unfortunately, all of this great progress has distracted the team from implementing a good design. So they blitz out another PowerPoint in a week. Unfortunately, the review today is not going to run smoothly because sponsor guy brought a couple of experts to evaluate the design. The experts ask some questions that embarrass the engineering team and a couple of days later they get feedback suggesting the design needs more work and some requirements need to change.
One year later, half of the engineering team has quit and the other half continues to find defects while implementing the shoddy design they came up with in the three months following their last review. Management has been telling the sponsor that things are progressing smoothly, but they know what their reality looks. Some teams are still fighting over the unfinished design. The junior engineers have a stream of unending questions because they have no idea what they are doing. Some senior guys are hiding in the corner ignoring them, some have left entirely. The delivery date is tomorrow. It seems like there are some violent rapids at the bottom of this waterfall.
*We’re almost done — A synonym for we’re not going to make it and are nowhere close to done, but we’re going to pretend like we are.
