Impossible Projects

WORK:
This story needs a little background to understand. First, our group’s activities are governed by Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). These are complicated, dry and unpleasant documents, which are intended to describe how our general workflow and regular tasks go. Because the SOPs are complex they have a detailed review process and are subject to [hot] debate. Thus getting a document issued is a very difficult task. One of our core functions if the creation of Risk Assessment for client products and this process has an SOP. The original SOP was published in 2000. At that time the document was already out of date because of constant revisions and bickering over content. Needless to say it was nearly useless. SOPs are intended to be reviewed and revised on a yearly basis, but the Risk Assessment SOP was not able to be revised until this year [because of the nature of the task and great debate]. For all the bickering and constant changes, the document was issued AND it included a major change to the assessment process. In the new SOP a process was implemented that would allow our documents to be audited (for QA). I was saddled with writing the document!

The process of assigning risk to a product is truly professional judgment. Somewhere along the lines a decision was made that the process had to be auditable and to do that the risk assignment needed to be a numerical process.
Thus you end up with a process that is repeatable and easily auditable (numbers v. judgment). The task of creating the metric was mine. It was very difficult and more than once did the requirements change.

I did finish it and it was put into the SOP and made “law.”

The PROBLEM:
Don’t give them what they ask for, give them what they need.
When the process IS professional judgment one should not call it math.

Now that the process is a complete failure the SOP needs to be rewritten. Nobody has been directly condescending but it’s there. It is worth mentioning that over the years various people have been tasked with what I did. None of them ever succeeded.

I did the impossible and people don’t like it.

Flood Update:
The professionals we hired have been doing a good job cleaning up the basement. The house itself smells normal. The garage (where all the rotting carpet is) is so nasty it could gag a maggot. We have to keep the carpet until Friday when the insurance adjuster can come out to smell the nasty stuff. I fear that the stink will reduce to where he wants to try and clean it [when it MUST be burned]. The rest of the house is pretty well recovered, but we are going to be under construction for quite some time to come.

I will be very happy when the basement is back to its former glory. It was a pretty nice space to play on the computer or hang with friends. Plus the kids will have additional space and the tension level will be reduced. They are forced into closer quarters than any of us like.