Roadblocks

One of the things in my career that I have been fortunate enough to not encounter is a problem that is too much to overcome. I am able to diagnose, learn and fix problems very quickly, and I have gotten used to using that ability to get me out of numerous jams over the years. Back in 2005 when I was working for Columbia Natural Resources, I was tasked with getting VPN tunnels working to support our WAN environment which in of itself was not a big deal. We were using an end-to-end Cisco solution and all had went well with the rollout until I got to Elkhorn City, Kentucky. At this particular location we had DSL from a local telco that I was trying to use with a Cisco router in order to build the tunnel but unfortunately it just was not stable at all. I worked on the problem for about a week but eventually figured out a way to use a DSL card and hard configure the router to act as the DSL modem which bypassed the poor excuse of a modem that I had been using. This fixed the issues and the telco wanted me to document what I did to make it work which I found pretty amusing.

Why take this trip down memory lane? Well these past few weeks I have been engaged with a client that is using software that simply isn't documented and doesn't work as designed. There is little to no documentation that exists and the developers of the product appear to be in another world. To summarize, it has been the most frustrating project I have ever been a part of in my IT career. I have read horror stories of poor project management and planning, seen the articles about how companies end up in situations that appear hopeless and I used to scoff at those poor souls who were in that situation. How did they get themselves in such a mess to begin with? Now, I can see how these "perfect storms" occur, which doesn't even explain how I am in this particular mess.

I have tried pretty much everything I know at this point, and time is running out on the project which makes it even worse. If you know me, you know I don't give up easily and will not say I quit until I am told to walk away. In situations like this, I think it is important to try to learn as much as possible about what you could have done better or why you are in such a tough spot so you don't repeat any past mistakes. Once I am done with this project, I hope to have a write-up of what NOT to do for folks that may be interested in such a document :-)