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PM Hell

Every once in a while, I run up against a project manager on a client project who seems to be there just to make my life hell. Usually I just let this roll off me since it’s only a temporary condition — that’s part of why I work as an independent, after all — but sometimes I just have to rant.

To begin with, I usually work on the design side of things, from functional requirements through technical design, and I leave the project management to the trained professionals: not only do I not like doing project management, I’m not very good at it. I think that many companies do a great disservice by "promoting" technical people to project managers by allowing that to be the only pathway for their advancement, rather than creating senior technical positions with the same prestige and pay. What happens in the current model, since so many developers have moved into project management roles, is that the term "project manager" has come to mean someone who also does some amount of the business requirements or design work on a project as well as managing it.

This is just plain wrong.

First of all, if someone is tasked with managing the project, let them manage the project without burdening them with other roles that might be in conflict with their primary role. Second, if someone has been in project management for a while, their technical skills are probably a bit rusty, and you could end up with poor results. Furthermore, many people in project management don’t even have a technical background, but are expected to take on technical project work because of the assumption that they used to be a developer; this is almost always not going to work out well.

The worst case that I experienced was when an ex-COBOL programmer was assigned by his large management consulting employer as a project manager on an implementation project, but he was obviously frustrated by that position and wanting to do technical design. I was the lead architect on the job, but he argued with pretty much every point in the design, even though he had no understanding of the technical development environment, and little understanding of the specific products that we were using (products on which I was very experienced). We spent a lot of time arguing over things, only to end up back where I started in the first place. Since I was a subcontractor to his company, he lobbied to have my contract terminated (which was within their rights, with the appropriate amount of notice) and I breathed a sigh of relief over not having to deal with him any more, as well as not having to go to a very cold part of the country in February. The end result: the architecture and design were redone by the project manager with some input from a couple of the developers who weren’t familiar with the BPMS; the system was installed more than a year late, went way over budget, and didn’t meet the customer requirements. After turfing out the big consulting firm, the customer called me back to see if I could help fix the mess. I laughed all the way to a different customer in a warmer climate.

A more recent PM from hell wanted to completely control my access to the customer. As an independent contractor rather than permanent staff, she may have felt threatened by my existence, and obviously felt she could do my job just as well as I could — without any apparent skills or experience at it. Since I often work offsite and she worked onsite, she was able to convince the customer to funnel every piece of email and documentation that I needed through her, rather than just having the customer copy her on communications to me. There were obviously a lot of conversations (via email) going on that I was not privy to, and which would have made my job easier, but the PM decided to filter the information that went to me. At one point, she even said that she was doing this in order to "watch my back" for me (presumably so that she knew exactly where to stick the knife). At one point I needed a detailed database schema, and the PM replied that what she had was too detailed for me; I suggested that I could make that decision, and to just send it on, but instead, she had someone in the internal IT group run a not-detailed-enough report for me. When I asked for more information, the PM said "This is what we decided was best to send to you." Every interaction that I had with this PM was the same frustrating, teeth-pulling exercise. Although I did a good job for the customer, it could have been better if I’d had wider access to people and information.

I have a huge amount of respect for skilled project managers, but let’s get a few things straight:

  1. I don’t want your job, so don’t feel threatened. I like my job just fine, or I wouldn’t be on the project in the first place.
  2. I don’t care if you want my job, the customer hired me to do it, not you. Do your own damned job.
  3. Don’t create barriers between me and the sources of information that I need in order to do my job, or you will negatively impact the end product and the customer satisfaction.
2007 12 13 business Comments (2)

Don’t fuck with my finances

We all know that Intuit (the maker of Quicken) treats its customers like crap, yet there are few alternatives for a Canadian wanting to maintain proper personal financial records, especially when they are multi-currency. I’m sure that Microsoft Money would also do this, but the time spent converting my 10+ years of records just doesn’t seem worth it, and there’s really no guarantee that I’m not going to have a whole raft of other problems with MS Money.

In their latest "screw the customer" ploy, Intuit forced me to upgrade from my reliable old 2002 version of Quicken, which did everything that I need it to do, by stating that after the end of the year, bank downloads and securities/fund price updates would no longer work. Bank downloads I can live with, since I could have just blocked Quicken from getting through my firewall and used the old .QIF format for downloading instead of the online exchange format, but I really need to have my securities and fund prices updated so that I know how my portfolio’s doing.

Shortly after updating, I noticed that it had downloaded some historical pricing data from around August — even though I had not requested any historical price downloads — that were totally screwed up: most of the Canadian equities were 10x what they should have been. Note that my old version of Quicken, which I had been using at the time of the faulty prices, had not picked up the bogus prices; I checked the Quicken forums for a discussion on that topic, and found that it is only the recent Quicken versions that are having this problem. I hand-deleted all the bogus prices in order to get my historical numbers back where they should be, completely unimpressed.

Today, I did my usual update in Quicken, and imagine my surprise to see that my portfolio had jumped by a huge amount overnight. Again, it looks like most of the Canadian equity prices are downloading at 10x what they should be.

The only response on the post on the Quicken forum is from an Intuit employee from June 22nd — presumably when the problem first appeared — who stated:

Hello All,
We are aware of the recent issue with the Canadian security prices and are investigating the cause of this issue. We hope to have this corrected as soon as possible–
Thanks for your patience–

Okay, I don’t have any patience left for this, so don’t bother thanking me. The other 7 pages of posts on this topic are filled with people who also don’t have patience for this. A single message from Intuit, left five months ago, as the only feedback on this recurring problem is completely inadequate. These are my finances, you idiots, not my recipe file! I’m extremely concerned with accuracy, and you should be even more concerned than I am about said accuracy.

I’ve just sent Intuit customer support an email, which they claim that they’ll respond to within two business days:

Canadian investment prices that are downloaded to Quicken are 10x what they should be in today’s update. This same error occurred a few months ago, which did not impact the 2002 version of Quicken that I was using at the time, but did get downloaded as historical price errors once I "upgraded" to the 2008 version. I had to hand-delete all of the bad price data from my portfolio and manually type in with prices from my brokerage.

Considering that I was forced to upgrade from 2002 under threat of losing the ability to update stock prices, the fact that the prices are broken is a bit ironic.

Let’s see what happens.

Update: they appear to have fixed the problem of today’s prices, and have downloaded price data that overwrites the previous 10x numbers. I’m still concerned about the larger issue of what they’re doing to prevent this obviously recurring problem in the future.

2007 11 23 customer service Comments (0)

The Great Canadian Rip-off

In case there’s any doubt that we’re being ripped off by retailers here in Canada, I went looking for a hard drive upgrade for my laptop today. On the HP US site, it’s $US237.50:

HP $US for replacement drive

On the HP Canada site, it’s $C318:

HP $CDN for replacement drive

However, a deposit of $US funds to my bank account earlier today showed that the $US is only worth $0.938 Canadian, which means that we should be paying $237.50 x .938 = $C222.78. So we’re paying a premium of 318 - 222.78 = $95.22, or 42.7% over the US price.

Guess that I’ll be waiting for my next trip to the US to pick up one of these. Canadian retailers, I’m not the only one: bring your prices in line or we all start cross-border shopping.

2007 10 30 canada Comments (2)

Screwed 2.0

You know that a Web 2.0 company is likely in trouble when their new and improved monetization scheme is to nuke their free basic accounts without notice, holding their users’ data hostage pending a signup to a paid premium account. That’s exactly what happened today with Eventbrite, an event registration service that I’ve used in the past and heavily endorsed.

Getting screwed by Eventbrite

Eventbrite’s original line, like most Web 2.0 companies, was that they would always offer a free basic service and a paid premium service, with some nice features on the premium versions. Features that, unfortunately, now include logging on.

Until quite recently, I managed the website and event registration for a not-for-profit club (as a volunteer). A couple of years ago, I convinced the board that we really needed to accept credit cards, and eventually moved event registration and membership renewals to Eventbrite with PayPal for credit card payments. I stepped down from the board this summer, and had a call a few weeks ago from the person who is now managing the event registrations to say that she could no longer add more than one type of ticket to an event — the club had always used a member price and non-member price for tickets. I checked it out, and sure enough, they had actually retracted functionality that had been part of the basic service all along.

The real kicker came today, when she called me again to say that Eventbrite had cut off all access to the wine club’s account unless they upgraded to a premium membership, because of a new rule that says that you can’t collect more than $1000 in ticket sales (in total? per month? per event? unknown) with a basic account, but have to upgrade to a premium account. No advance notice about this so that the club could prepare alternatives, just the inability to login as of today. That means that the two events that they have in progress right now have been hijacked by Eventbrite: the club is unable to access the list of attendees that have signed up to date, or even to shut down the event altogether if they no longer wish to use Eventbrite — which I’m pretty sure that they don’t, given the completely unacceptable behaviour of Eventbrite so far. The event still shows up for people to buy tickets, but the club can’t access it in any way.

Getting screwed by Eventbrite

In their help section, pictured above, they state “we have shifted Eventbrite to a one level service that offers these new features to all accounts at a low fee. With that initiative in mind, we are phasing out our Basic (Free) service”. So much for a perpetual free basic service. Furthermore, this likely prices them out of range of most small not-for-profit clubs (like the one that I used to volunteer for) because that extra 2.5% on top of the ticket price — in addition to the 2.9% charged by PayPal for credit card processing — does make a difference for the little guys. What’s really needed is an event registration service at a lower cost, or maybe a good open source solution that can be run on a small organization’s hosted website directly.

Eventbrite appears to be offering a “free” upgrade to the premium service for events that are already in your account, so the club could sign up and presumably get access to the data that’s trapped in there for the current events, but would you really trust these people with your credit card information?

2007 10 01 customer service
technology Comments (0)

Your dictionary is your friend (especially for the illiterate)

I just had an interesting exchange over on my business blog. I wrote a post that someone from a vendor disagreed with (it was a bit controversial in areas), and he called my statements “vacuous” in a public comment on the post. I emailed privately to him and said that I found “vacuous” to be a bit harsh, and he replied with a snippy “well, what word do you suggest, Sandy?” Later, he sent a follow-up email to say that I could replace “vacuous” with “loose”, and I replied that “vacuous” is usually defined as “lacking in intelligence”, not “loose”.

Turns out that Mr. Rocket Scientist didn’t actually know that…

2007 07 23 Comments (0)

Payments with PayPal personal

When I first signed up for a PayPal personal account, I couldn’t receive payments from credit cards (no problem) and it was free to receive payments funded from someone’s bank account. Presumably, PayPal made their money because I was also using their service to buy things online from companies with business accounts (like my wine club), which pay a fee on every payment received regardless of whether the transaction is funded by debit or credit.

A friend recently tried to send me some money via PayPal, and I had the option to accept it — with a 4.9% + $0.55 transaction fee! Turns out that she was funding the transaction with a credit card, and of course someone has to pay the merchant fees on any credit card transaction. According to the fees page, which I found after much searching, PayPal Balance, PayPal Instant Transfer and PayPal eCheck are all free to accept in a personal account; after some investigation, it looks like Instant Transfer is the default method of having the payment come out of your bank account, although I have no idea what the difference is between that and a debit transaction (which does incur the 4.9% fee). That means, I assume, that if she had funded it out of her bank account, there would have been no transaction fee, although it’s all guesswork at this point.

Needless to say, I refused the payment, and she’s now sent me an Interac email money transfer.

2007 06 02 off topic Comments (0)

The internet Darwin awards

The Darwin awards pay tribute to people who manage to find themselves dead through their own stupidity: a voluntary, yet accidental, culling of the herd. I think that it’s time for the internet Darwin awards, for people who behave so stupidly online that they eventually go up in (virtual) flames.

A recent case of this that I experienced first-hand was a VP of sales of an ECM/BPM vendor who thought that it was a good idea to republish my blog posts (from my BPM blog), in their entirety, on his site. I can understand why someone might want to steal my stellar prose :) but you have to admit that it’s pretty stupid to plagiarize from a blogger who focusses on your own industry — how stupid do you have to be to convince yourself that that’s not going to come back and bite you in the butt? According to an apologetic CEO, that person is no longer with the company. I checked his site, and it looks like he’s busy stealing his next idea from the Web 2.0 space.

In this week’s situation, I have another copyright violator who is reprinting my posts on their site. Now, he’s not really in my industry — he appears to be some sort of direct marketing consultant — but his site, blog and LinkedIn profile are covered with nice phrases like “top quality sales and marketing requires attention to your customer’s needs and to the law”, “global expert in EEC Data Privacy legislation and compliance, driving global compliance with national legislation”, and “passionate about Data Protection and compliance with the law ensuring positive marketing from ethical corporations” all of which seem like odd sentiments for someone who is stealing my intellectual property. He even claims to have been Chief Privacy Officer for Europe, Africa and the Middle East during his tenure at a major analyst firm a few years back. And on the site where he’s stealing my blog posts and those of many other bloggers, buried in the meta data of the page but not visible on the page itself, is the disclaimer “Content of all feeds copyrights are with respective copyright owners. Feeds are republished as a service and all copyrights are acknowledged.” So now it’s a service to violate copyright — who knew? I’m fine with fair use: publish an excerpt of any of my posts, provide a clear link in the text of your post (not buried in a footer) back to my original post, and ping a trackback so that I know that you’re doing me the favour of sending people my way. I’ll probably come over, look at your site, and even link to it on my site if I think that it has any value.

The latest copyright violation

Now, this is the interesting part: eventually, I likely would have discovered his site on my own, but someone put a comment on one of my posts yesterday, saying “I found your blog through [link]“. When I went to the link, I discovered the above-mentioned site that’s violating my copyright, and I couldn’t even find a link to my own post, which made me a bit suspicious. I checked the records for who owns the domain, and sure enough, it’s the same person that left the comment. (On later investigation, I did find a link back to my post from his, in tiny print at the bottom of the post, mixed in with the del.icio.us, Digg and other standard links that no one ever reads.)

So the question of the day is: how stupid do you have to be to violate copyright against someone’s blog by reprinting their posts on your website, then add a comment to one of their blog posts telling them that you found their post through your site, all the while pretending to have nothing to do with the site even though your name is on the domain’s whois record? And how long before your site — registered on April Fools’ Day — self-immolates?

Speaking of providing a service, I took it upon myself to track down a few of the other bloggers who are being ripped off by this guy’s site — some of whom I know personally — and let them know what’s going on. You might think that it’s pointless to do things like this, but the only way to fight against people who rip you off on the internet is to expose them for what they are.

2007 04 06 technology Comments (0)

mesh: a conference by, for and featuring white men

Last year, there was a certain amount of noise about the fact that the mesh organizers managed to find only a tiny number of women speakers — 6 out of 50, or some such ridiculous ratio — and this year is not shaping up to be any better, with exactly zero women keynote speakers. It appears, however, that they’re trying to head off the protests via a somewhat disingenuous post on Mark Evans’ blog:

The truth is we wanted women keynotes, spent a lot of time compiling a list of excellent candidates and tried to make it happen. But, for a variety of reasons, we couldn’t make it work.

Yeah, those reasons being:

  1. If we talk to them, we might get cooties.
  2. The strippers women who we usually hang out with don’t meet the requirements.
  3. None of them would agree to get the coffee and take notes.
  4. The only ones that we could find didn’t have good enough tits.
  5. We didn’t think that their husbands would let them attend.
  6. What do women know about technology, anyway?
2007 03 02 meshconference
technology
women Comments (6)

Sporadic email problems

If you’re trying to email me now, you’ve noticed that my kemsleydesign.com domain is totally screwed up, likely due to Yahoo. Hopefully things will be sorted out by tomorrow; in the interim, you can email me at skemsley at gmail.

2007 02 23 technology Comments (0)

Yahoo has hijacked my domain!!

Three days later, the saga continues. Yahoo seems unable to figure out how to release my corporate domain and allow it to transfer to my new registrar, GoDaddy: it is still languishing in a “Pending Current Registrar Approval” state.

Today, I spent a long time on the phone with Yahoo technical support trying to get some actual technical support. I explained that I had initiated the transfer from GoDaddy’s side, entered in all the necessary information including the authorization code from Yahoo (which, when they receive the request to release the domain, is supposed to be Yahoo’s clue that I actually initiated the transfer). Then, I explained that the domain appeared to be stuck waiting for Yahoo to approve the transfer and relinquish my domain to the new registrar.

First, the tech support guy went through the same claim as I had fallen for earlier in the week, that they’re just the hosting provider and have nothing to do with the domains. I said that I had contacted Melbourne IT and that Melbourne had assured me that Yahoo was in fact a reseller of domains, so is required to deal with technical support issues. He immediately dropped that one — they must be trained to say that first for anything to do with domains, but also to not push it since it’s not true.

Next, he told me that the only way to “cancel the domain” (which is not what I asked to do) is to cancel my hosting account with them, which would cause interruption to both my corporate website (bad) and email (disastrous). I pointed out that I didn’t want to cancel my domain, just get them to release it for transfer, and he insisted that I had to cancel my hosting account in order to do this.

I tried to explain the logic of why this wouldn’t work, and even quoted their own help pages on this subject back to him: you transfer the domain first, then switch the DNS servers to your new hosting provider, then wait 2-3 days for the DNS changes to propagate through the internet, then cancel the old hosting account. If you cancel the old hosting account first, then you’re fucked: your domain will be unreachable until you get the domain transferred and the DNS servers.

We went through various rounds and permutations of this, including one where he came back, walked me through the pages to find my authorization code, and told me that I need this for the transfer. Duh, no kidding, moron — I told you that I already did that at the beginning of the call, and at least once since then.

I then waited 10-15 minutes on hold for a supervisor to come on, who told me the same thing: you have to cancel the plan in order to release the domain. I made him go to their own help page and read parts of it to him, highlighting the bit about “If you’d like to transfer your domain away from Yahoo!, we strongly recommend transferring your domain before you cancel.”

After a total of 58 minutes on the phone, and after the supervisor told me several times that I needed to cancel my hosting plan in order to get the domain to transfer, he started blaming GoDaddy: obviously, they haven’t initiated the transfer, because Yahoo’s systems would have released it automatically. And, by the way, he told me, definitely don’t cancel your hosting plan until that domain is transferred, or you’ll have an interruption in service…

2007 02 21 customer service
technology Comments (5)