My Life = The Dilbert Zone

It’s been a hectic few weeks. I’ve decided to leave full-time employment with my long-time employer (5 years is very long for me). Instead, I’ll be doing part-time consulting work for them, and will be working full-time on a mobile start-up. These past two weeks, I’ve been getting my ducks in a row, transitioning duties, lining up projects to work on when I’m part-time.

I’m a Dilbert reader. There are frequently interesting parallels between Dilbert and my experiences in the corporate world. But Dilbert is generally filled with hyperbole. That’s what makes it funny. The comic strips are based in common experience, but they are kneaded and exaggerated for effect. Most of the time.

My job covers a wide spectrum of responsibility. I’m a project manager, but I have a development and analysis background, so I’m generally brought in early to projects. I had the most bizarre, illogical, unrealistic conversation the other day with a senior project manager in my firm.

His organization needs a custom application built. Fine, I suggest a teleconference with a few of his people so that we can discuss their requirements. For those unfamiliar with the development process, requirements and design generally require quite a bit of effort. A decade ago, they would require as much, if not more, time than development. Agile and iterative development have been somewhat embraced in the corporate world, so they don’t take nearly as long, but they still require a lot of effort.

We begin discussing their requirements, and it very quickly becomes clear that no one in the room has even considered what problems they are trying to solve with this proposed application. Without a purpose, goal, or objective of any kind, it’s impossible to propose a solution. So I dig a bit further. Many times, even if clients don’t know what they’re trying to solve, they still have an idea of what they want. Maybe they’ve been looking at an off-the-shelf product they want to integrate, or they’ve seen a piece of functionality that they want to emulate. Maybe they have something firm in mind for a deployment approach — they want software that installs on a PC, they want a web-based solution, they have server X they’d like to leverage, etc. Still nothing.

Okay, we’re getting nowhere, so I politely say something to this effect of “why are meeting, what did you hope to accomplish today?” And the response I get back is along the lines of they want an application built (here we go again).

We continue this exchange for another minute, and then they drop the bomb. I kid you not, this is verbatim. This statement is burned into my brain, and likely will remain there until the day I die. The senior project manager says “We don’t know yet what we want, but we want you to build it for us, and then we’ll tell you if it’s right.” Stunned silence on my part. He must be joking, I’m thinking. But he’s not, and he continues talking about how he wants us to build something that does something magical for him, but he’ll only know what he really wants until after he sees what we’ve already done.

Needless to say, this is not one of the projects that I’ll be taking on as a consultant. A day or so later, the Dilbert of the Day arrives in my inbox, and it’s a near perfect parallel for my experience.

Tags: Dilbert, corporate, software development, requirements, design