Random Thoughts on Life

Front seat at the implosion

Today I had an interesting meeting. The CM responsibilities for our company had been given to my supervisor and had been my primary responsibility, until about 11 months ago. At that time, the CM improvements were put aside (we mostly do CM by hand - no kidding - no SCC software and perform hand merging of code) and I was tasked with cleaning up a mess that had been made in our Java development area. In the mean time, some of the old hands at the company were tasked with continuing on the CM improvements. These people are neither forward thinkers, technically savvy, nor familiar with best practices. Well today, we had a meeting with our department director, to determine how we are going to approach damage control in meeting next week. It was an hour long and in the end was simply a front row seat of the implosion. The person tasked with designing our new binary distribution process basically said that it was impossible to do, at which point a 'lively' discussion ensued. After a little while, I looked over and the director had literally put her head down and was just letting it roll on. I have to believe this was the moment that she realized that putting these people in charge of the CM improvements, the very people who hadn't changed a thing in 10+ years, was a mistake. From that perspective, it was a fun meeting to watch. Once she recovered, she put her foot down and dictated what our response was going to be. It will be fun to see what changes, if any, are made in the coming weeks.

posted by MrPopman @ 5:53 PM