This reminds me of a meeting I had one Friday at 3pm.
There were three hardware subsystem groups with corresponding software subsystem groups, plus one support group that produced software simulators of the different subsystems to allow interface testing before the other subsystems were completed.
One subsystem made a fundamental design change, and spent weeks updating things. When they started integration testing, nothing worked. That's when the subsystem that made the change realized they hadn't bothered to tell the other teams, so the simulator team had implemented incorrect and obsolete behaviour.
Which is to say, the documented and agreed to behaviour.
The other subsystems were still developing, and could absorb the impact, but they needed updated simulators that implemented the new subsystems' behaviour. Which was undocumented, of course. So, they called an emergency meeting for 3pm Friday to discuss it.
Managers who expected that the meeting would be to discuss timelines and documentation of the new behaviour were disappointed, however. The subsystem team had no time for that nonsense. Instead, they sketched out the behaviour that they had implemented on a whiteboard, and said that's what the simulator group had to implement for the project to have even a chance of making the deadline.
The simulator team's manager stood up, pointed out that this was all unplanned work that was not in the schedule, he didn't have any spare resources to work on it, there was no budget for it, and the whiteboard outline was not only incomplete, but it was still a moving target. So there was no way that he could pull people off of other projects to do this, it was going to take a while.
The project manager then said, in perfect seriousness, "That's okay, there's no rush. Monday is fine".
The amount of work would be weeks, if not months, and management not only thought it could be done in a weekend (delusion level: bwahahaha), they were casually assuming at 3pm on Friday that one team could introduce a fundamental design change and that another team would, on no notice, all drop their weekend plans and personal lives to do this unplanned work.
And the kicker was even worse. A couple of weeks later, after the simulator people did, after great effort (and much budget) finally manage to get a bare-bones implementation ready for preliminary testing, the subsystem group responded with, "Oh, we discovered that approach actually didn't work, so we went back to the old design. Didn't anyone tell you?"
When I was asked why I turned down offers of promotions from project management teams, I said that if I took one, the hallways would be stacked with bodies three deep within my first week. After I related the above story to the exec that was trying to get me to accept the promotion, he just said "understood".
Your comics are damn good.
Resemblance to corporate situations are bang on.
This reminds me of a meeting I had one Friday at 3pm.
There were three hardware subsystem groups with corresponding software subsystem groups, plus one support group that produced software simulators of the different subsystems to allow interface testing before the other subsystems were completed.
One subsystem made a fundamental design change, and spent weeks updating things. When they started integration testing, nothing worked. That's when the subsystem that made the change realized they hadn't bothered to tell the other teams, so the simulator team had implemented incorrect and obsolete behaviour.
Which is to say, the documented and agreed to behaviour.
The other subsystems were still developing, and could absorb the impact, but they needed updated simulators that implemented the new subsystems' behaviour. Which was undocumented, of course. So, they called an emergency meeting for 3pm Friday to discuss it.
Managers who expected that the meeting would be to discuss timelines and documentation of the new behaviour were disappointed, however. The subsystem team had no time for that nonsense. Instead, they sketched out the behaviour that they had implemented on a whiteboard, and said that's what the simulator group had to implement for the project to have even a chance of making the deadline.
The simulator team's manager stood up, pointed out that this was all unplanned work that was not in the schedule, he didn't have any spare resources to work on it, there was no budget for it, and the whiteboard outline was not only incomplete, but it was still a moving target. So there was no way that he could pull people off of other projects to do this, it was going to take a while.
The project manager then said, in perfect seriousness, "That's okay, there's no rush. Monday is fine".
The amount of work would be weeks, if not months, and management not only thought it could be done in a weekend (delusion level: bwahahaha), they were casually assuming at 3pm on Friday that one team could introduce a fundamental design change and that another team would, on no notice, all drop their weekend plans and personal lives to do this unplanned work.
And the kicker was even worse. A couple of weeks later, after the simulator people did, after great effort (and much budget) finally manage to get a bare-bones implementation ready for preliminary testing, the subsystem group responded with, "Oh, we discovered that approach actually didn't work, so we went back to the old design. Didn't anyone tell you?"
When I was asked why I turned down offers of promotions from project management teams, I said that if I took one, the hallways would be stacked with bodies three deep within my first week. After I related the above story to the exec that was trying to get me to accept the promotion, he just said "understood".