This way --->

Awful weather. The only place it wasn't foggy was in town. Clearly everything is in the courtyard.

On top of the hill we could hardly see the fence and the cows huddled together on the other side. Grey doesn't cover it!

The day was somewhat interesting.

After several, no, many weeks getting increasingly concerned and vocal about the project we're working on and our our inability to deliver it due to poor tools, specification and documentation from the project team, it all came to a head today.

Being asked to deliver something entirely new with no agreement from the stakeholders on minimum deliverables has been bugging me for a while. The potential for scope creep (not that we had a scope to start with) and stretching for increasingly unreasonable targets by well-meaning developers while risking not delivering any value has been unmanageable. Our ability to second guess everyone has been stretched beyond breaking point. We've ended up being default project Business Analysts, System architects and business process and business technical consultants as well trying to tie together the ongoing future BAU processes that we'll have to support.

As if that wasn't enough, facing insurmountable systems performance and technical issues on a system that nobody has used before, no training, lack of tools and many other issues, a series of hastily arranged conference calls this morning resulted with the Project Manager agreeing to temporarily suspend the project. It's a great relief that our voices have finally been heard.

It sounds like a black picture, but one I'm sure gets repeated time and time again across many businesses. At least we got here quickly.

We can now get some proper decisions and agreements on targets from the business and force them to engage with us. We start again on Monday!