I Need Help!

[daveon]

So, today is the last day of our trial test project for a new "breed" of mobile phone. The report we have to produce supports an absolutely enormous sales bid which as a salesman on commission is very dear to my heart.

So far I've written pretty much all the bid documentation and I was kind of hoping that with a bunch of highly skilled Technical bods working on the testing angle my work would be limited to writing the high level overview (all done!) and reviewing the findings.

Am I too naive? Is this too much to ask? Could, just once, other people do what they said they would in a way which makes sense to third parties who are not software engineers (what the client asked for months ago)???

Of course it is.

Does everybody else have this problem? Just for once I'd like to work in an Environment like Star Trek: TNG where all problems can be resolved in hours and everything you ask for arrives immediately, including the impossible.

At this stage there is a fighting chance that not only will it bugger up our friend's visiting over the weekend but I may also miss the Rugby tomorrow, and that will not do.

Comments

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

HA HA HA ha ha haha... oh, sorry *wipes eyes*.

The number of techies who can write stuff in English - or at least, English comprehensible to a non-specialist - is very, very small. I've seen a lot of documentation which fails that test :( (and plenty which hasn't made sense to a specialist either)

[daveon.livejournal.com]

My favourite so far was asking one of the techies to explain a failure "SS codes other than listed on FDN list can be used by menu and MMI when FDN is active" and getting a shuffling of feet and a general - "mmm... yes, that's a good one isn't it?"

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately a big bid needs a project manager, and too few organisations actually want to put that level of resource on a bid.

Usually our bid responses are written by the architect, an analyst and the PM, with the executuve summary compiled by all involved plus the sales team.

You lucky lucky bastard!

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I dream of an architect, an analyst and a PM I do! Years I've been here and not so much as a sales support engineer! You little sneak... :-)

Theorectically we would have committed that kind of resource, but unlike pretty much every other software consultancy in the wireless field we're at about 99.5% resource allocation which makes bid support hard to juggle with project committments. We are recruiting quite hard at the moment but there's always a slight lag.