Curiouser & curiouser

Well, it's been a while since my last post, and I'd intended to find something either profound or ludicrous to write about this weekend. (Like making a pilgrimage to the Nordstrom Mother Church in downtown Seattle.)

But that got buggered when at 1530 yesterday (that would be Friday) I got an email from my manager informing me that she has to run through a "draft" business plan (for a product I'm assigned to) review next Friday, two weeks before the "official" deadline I've been working towards. (This "review", BTW, is essentially a go/no-go decision for building the application. Something about commitments in December requiring an earlier decision than the end of the month.) That being the case, I was instructed to have a "preliminary" draft for her review Monday afternoon.

Since I'm in back-to-back meetings Monday (because I'm trying to work out how we're going to build an application without committing development resources to it), that means I'm pulling a biz plan out of the peanut butter today and tomorrow.

Now, I thought this particular project was passing strange because normally the product manager (that would be me) does some market research, determines the market need, projects what kind of revenue the product could draw, analyzes the competitive landscape, posits what features would meet that need, creates a business plan based on that research, gets the product approved by management based on that business analysis, builds a functional requirements plan and then works with dev to determine the feature set and timeframe for the initial product release...

Only in this case, it seems senior management brokered some deals months ago with data providers and instructed my unit to build an application that would use the data.

So I parachuted on to a train that had left the station without benefit of rails, and I was given the mission of steering it safely to some nebulous successful destination.

This sudden turnaround on the approval gateway timeline is another bad sign. I don't know exactly what it signifies, but it's not going to be anything good.

(Another thing that gives me pause is that evidently "business plans" in this organization are done in PowerPoint. I feel like I'm in Romper Room. What's next--sock puppets?)

So this is why my next real post is delayed. I'm pulling out my smoke and; mirrors and hoping that I find the right ones for the occasion.

Or is this one instance where one size really does fit all?