Why Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War 999

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poor distribution maybe.

(IMHO the public morale raising that NASA does is immediate and priceless)

At a PPOE I was put in charge of a year-long project that had two months to go and nothing to show for it save some pretty graphics and a couple "barking up the wrong tree" dataflow algorithms. After spending a week looking through the wreckage I said "we have to start from square one" (the original database derivation was crap, I needed the customer sources), my manager said "no" (I presume because he didn't want to look bad to the client) and continued to say no; dunno how bad he looked when the project wasn't completed because I was somewhere else by then.

My team consisted of two very good programmers who were out of their respective fields but still very good, and a cheerful, conscientious secretary-gopher; coulda had the legwork done in 2 weeks, finished substrata in another month and a duct-taped front end to impress the client in the last two weeks (and another two weeks to finish the front end properly).

So who's at fault? the previous PM and crew who weren't experienced enough ? the manager for not trusting his SD's evaluation ? or me for not having enough interpersonal skills to convince him otherwise ?

"Blame shifting" and "information hoarding" are political tools not aligned with any particular working philosophy but they're less accepted therefore less effective in an individualistic paradigm.

works fine if the experts are peers within the command structure; sortof the opposite of what you generally advocate though: in the military the "product" always comes from on high and is enabled from down below. Similar to single-person run companies before the wannabees saturate the market and a Japanese collector buys the name.

rpl