We told them so

We signed off on the doomed project and sent it off to another agency almost two years ago, after I had cut back on posting here but before I had stopped entirely. It got passed back and forth for a while with other agencies and finally published about two months ago or so. Maybe I should stop calling it doomed. But its problems didn't end when it left the building. I'll try to go over a few of the problems it had while I wasn't posting here.

Things went normally with it for about eight months. Normal was still pretty bad, but there's nothing we can do about it while another agency is reviewing it, so normal was good enough. Then one day, a team member's bosses' boss asked for something. This guy was responsible for both XYZ and Operational L__ even though no one else wanted them and they made the project take months longer. Now he was asking to have them taken out of the project. Collectively they were over a quarter of the 400-page document spread out in a dozen chunks. In the meeting where he asked to have them removed, we pointed out as delicately as possible how big a job this would be, how much it would delay the already-late project, and how he could have prevented it a year before simply by not including them. His idea of an apology was a shrug and an "Oops."

Taking notes at that meeting, I slowly got the impression of a situation that would be amazingly miserable for someone, probably not for me, but I couldn't be sure. It was like sidling up to the Grand Canyon on a windy day, and then seeing that it was filled to five feet below the edge with black plastic trash bags. My eyes were bugged out during the meeting, but when I found H. right afterwards and briefed her, I couldn't keep from laughing. I was hysterical, choking out the explanation of the problem. What else could I do?

And then, a few months later, after that was dealt with, the lawyer offhandedly asked me where to find the final draft of a letter. Another requirement for the review that generally should be relatively easy, and done at the same time as everything else. But it wasn't. We just forgot. And the removal of XYZ and Operational L__ made it harder, because we had to go through multiple files in the archive to see what should be listed in this letter. And we had to do all that on a tight deadline, because the rule actually was sort of kind of close to ready.