Looming doom

At work these days*, I'm spending most of my time on a project that is, quite simply, doomed. DOOMED.

The first problem is the deadline. It's hard to say exactly how long this project should take - more about that later - but I'd estimate that normally it would take at least three years to do this. That sounds like a long time, but really, if you look at how much is required to do this from the very beginning to the very end, three or four years is pretty reasonable. Well, the deadline for this project, by Congressional mandate, is one year. If everything else was going perfectly we'd still be panicked and rushing through every step of it.

But everything isn't going perfectly. The subject matter expert is not an expert on his job; he has only been there since May, and this is the first such project he has worked on. He knows only his own most minimal responsibilities (at least, as far as they relate to mine) and does not know the responsibilities of anyone else on the team.

Also, he apparently is hard to get along with. I hadn't noticed this on my own when one person on the team complained to me about him, but after someone else involved with the project complained to him directly about his attitude in the middle of the meeting, I no longer had any doubt that there was some kind of problem. Now that I was looking for it I noticed him making a mildly sexist comment to the (female) lawyer, and both of the people who had complained about him were women, so that's probably it.

We could work around him, maybe, but there are other problems too. For some reason we're keeping track of everything we do in two places. This is probably to make it easier on another team member for his specific responsibility, but meanwhile it makes more work for me. Nowhere near double my workload, as it seemed it would be for a while, but still, more than usual.

I'm doing more than usual on this project in other ways too. Normally I'd have very little to do at this stage in a project. I'd probably attend meetings, but mainly just to take the minutes. In this case, though, I've started working on the regulatory language to get everything as far along as possible. But maybe I shouldn't have, because some of that has already proven unnecessary as the group thought and talked more about what they want.

Does this sound like a messy process? If so, that's partially because people are trying to do a ton of things. There was a large, comprehensive regulation just getting started on the usual "at least three years" timeline that would review basically everything regarding this category of facility. Then we got the Congressional mandate to allow one specific type of new facility, which happens to be in that category. This means that people on the team have bosses and colleagues who are trying to put the kitchen sink in here because they don't understand that this regulation is very narrow in focus - it absolutely has to be, to meet the deadline. Fortunately, I think that is under control by now. However, we are still trying to figure out whether including something here would make it less likely to succeed in the comprehensive revision and other complicated game-theory questions like that.

So I'm doing more work than usual on a project that probably still be in a much rougher state than usual when it is officially handed off to me. Some of that work has already been rendered a waste of time by other people. The project is already weeks behind our internal schedule, and the past few days have been productive but not several weeks' worth of productive. I think we have abandoned all hope of the deadline. At this point when a Congressman yells at someone I think the plan is to point to whatever the latest milestone was and hope that satisfies them, and carefully document how unreasonable the deadline was to cover everyones' asses. I'm not worried for my own job; I'm so far down the chain of command that I don't think responsibility can fall this far. I am, however, kinda worried about the job of someone else on the team I'm friendly with, and more generally I'm marveling about the epic scale of the snafu.

* This week I'm scheduled to spend 19 hours in meetings about this project, so far meetings have run late and ended early pretty evenly, and I'm spending at least a few hours working on it outside those meetings as well. And like I said, I don't normally have much to do during the part of the project.