Problems with Project Management

We have a PCI compliance project at work that was supposed to be completed today. About 4 weeks ago, the major requirements of the project were changed. Since that time, one of our little group of 3 has spent the entire time in Europe. I spent a week out of town, and a good portion of this week in meetings. We also had a fairly interesting incident with one of our SAN appliances several weeks ago.

As a result, we didn't get a major portion of needed server setup on a critical machine done. The project manager lady showed up yesterday at 4:30 wanting to find out what tasks were yet to be finished. Besides being a little annoyed at her waiting until the last minute to come find out what was happening, she's fairly annoying. John and I worked to give her as little information as possible, trying to get her to give up and go away. This went on for about 40 minutes, she kept trying to threaten to "run it up the line", which we shot down. (Having been in contact with "up the line" people all along, and knowing several of them were out of town.) Finally she asked what she should tell people when they asked, I suggested "They are not cooperating in any way, shape, or form". This appeared to have ticked her off, she left in a huff.

This morning, we were in architect's council, discussing this project and some others things we brought in to talk with that group about. About 10 minutes into the meeting, the project manager and her director came in. She looked disappointed to see us there. She appeared to not have the courage to talk about us while we were there.

This afternoon, while we were trying to get something fixed, she called having gathered a bunch of people on a conference call, and wanted to force the final critical step to occur immediately. She didn't seem to listen to the fact that we were actively working on an outage, and didn't want to have the final step completed until the outage was over. She was also trying to push through a step that didn't need to happen until next week, some of the other guys on the phone were trying, seemingly with little success, to explain that 4:30pm on Friday was a bad time to try to get network lines pulled and ready for use.

I was able to get her to stop talking about the other thing, but she kept talking about the portion we were not at that minute ready to implement. After 3 or 4 attempts to get her to listen, I hung up the phone. As far as we could tell, they were still on the conference call about 45 minutes later, when the problem got fixed. We pawned our part of the changes off on the on-call engineer, and left. As far as I know, they are still talking about it now...