The management will continue until morale improves

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" - Source unknown, probably Narcotics Anonymous

There was a meeting of the doomed project. In addition to the usual problems, apparently we've attracted attention from on high. This is never a good sign.

In addition to the doomed project, there are also two other projects with related focuses. There is a lot of overlap in resources between the three projects - in plain English, a lot of people who are assigned to more than one of the teams. At today's meeting, we learned that team members' bosses' bosses have noticed that these projects are having problems. To address this, they have told us to start updating them weekly on status and activities via a spreadsheet, in hopes that they can better identify exactly what the problems are.

This spreadsheet has rows for each person on the team (at least 20) and columns for various types of input (six). (If we had nothing to do with a certain issue, leaving its column blank is acceptable, but everyone is expected to fill at least something in weekly.) It will probably be a bit confusing, because in some ways it resembles spreadsheets the team has already been using but not in other ways and is used very differently. There is going to be a new spreadsheet created every week, and everyone on the team will be responsible for reporting on their own activity that week.

When faced with the problem "People on this project are working too hard and being pulled in too many directions", I'm sure that adding a new, nearly pointless requirement isn't the absolute worst way possible to help, but I'm also sure it's not a good way.

I suppose I could take a positive view of this. The proposed spreadsheet originally had seven columns of various categories of activity, but in this morning's meeting the team decided that we could narrow that down to six. (We eliminated two or three columns as redundant, but also added a new one and split another column into two separate ones.) So that means we'll have to keep track of a little less and it'll be a little clearer than the original draft. So the meeting could have gone worse than it did. That's good, I suppose.

(More general update on the doomed project: it recently transitioned to a new phase. The ball is now mainly in the lawyers' court, to be followed by mine, and then the economists'. This means that the subject matter experts will have to do a bit less for the next few weeks than they did for the past few months, and the lawyer, me, and the economist each will have more during our respective phases. As slow and horrible as things have been, and as abjectly we're going to fail at the official deadline, and as much as I'll hate the period when the ball is in my court, we actually are making progress. I think.)