Worth the while?

I am sitting in the train, typing this out. Train from York to Norwich. Has sort of become my weekly grind. Almost every week, I go up (its north) to York, we keep discussing the requirements (even though we are half way past the macro design stage) and the BAs come up with a whole new set of requirements. PMs should be getting hyper about this kind of stuff, but well, they don't. Apart from stringent deadlines we are also supposed to follow the architecture of earlier release. A release that was again built on top of sketchy requirements. The users look at the reports from Release 1 and go "Well, I didnt ask for that."


A lot of new stuff came out in the discussion, but the design and the management team have decided, that since we don't have time, we will build on the poor existing discussion. Any enhancements. we will deal in the next release. Now, each release sort of is dependent on the previous and so, its difficult to get away from any shoddy piece of work earlier. Coz this is a data warehouse we are talking about, normalized system, where probably, we still have isolated bits of systems that don't impinge on each other.


Essentially, we are losing a chance here to stop or extend the design and revisit the architecture bit and set it right, before its too late. And I think, we will lose that chance.


The more you work, on a project like this, the more disappointed and disillusioned you get (The good-for-nothing project lead aptly asked during the closure "Have you lost the will to live?"). You can't really blame anyone individual, coz everyone is culpable. You just want to do the right thing, but you can't, coz of all these constraints and you feel "Is it worth my time?"

"Is this something, I should care for at all?".