The Bonus
My contract came up for renewal, and with it came an addendum: a big fat bonus for finishing something by a specific date, one month in the future. It left me feeling insulted and belittled.
Since last year, I've gone from being an integral figure in any planning or management effort, to an afterthought. In a lot of ways, this has been fantastic: I don't have to think about 95% of the IT stuff I used to have to care about. There is now just one thing I have to do: keep the business management system going, and make improvements as requested.
One might think that a major change to a set of fundamental business processes managed by my system might be cause to bring me into the introductory discussions to discover things like the amount of work required, and reasonable schedules for development and testing for all these changes. But that didn't happen.
Instead, when a situation arose that would bring in-house the entire testing protocol of another company, I wasn't brought into the discussions until the very last minute, when I was told that I had about four months to make all the required changes. After making a very aggressive (and patently unreasonable) project plan to accomplish this in the given time, I was then told that we needed to make about half of the outlined functionality work within a month.
I was told they would start with a small subset of the total range of tests after that first month, only small animals, and that they would only send a few at a time. The full range wouldn't be expected until after I had been able to make all the needed changes months down the road. Instead, the partner company stopped all in-house testing and put the entire load on us, three months early. Then they came unglued when the test results they got weren't 100% correct, resulting in two long lectures to me from upper management about how important the project is, all suddenly caring about testing cycles and release schedules.
After the first crazy mad month of building, I've spent the last two months playing catch-up and putting out fires. When I warned my clients that I wasn't able to keep to the schedule due to the changes in the project, the president of the company suggested that they should limit my pay until I finished the projects as outlined. This alone nearly made me walk. I told them in no uncertain terms that this would never happen. I am contracted hourly because I am the expert, and the only person on the planet who knows how this system works. I was not about to let them piece-meal my contract away.
If they had brought me in to the conversation early, saying that they had these things they wanted to do and wanted my opinion about how quickly things could be changed, I would have been able to give them some pretty comfortable and reasonable plans. If they had, I could see holding some personal obligation to keep to such schedules. But it wasn't my decision to take on this business, it wasn't my decision to accept an abbreviated schedule, and it wasn't my decision to choose to work on this rather than the rather extensive list of known issues already in the system. My deal is that they pay me an hourly rate for every hour I work for them, regardless of what I'm working on.
So I get this bonus addendum on my contract and it seriously makes me want to tear the whole thing up. Oh, look: some extra cash if I can magically make a deadline I've already said twice isn't going to happen because the partner company didn't follow the rules. As if I hadn't already been working at 100% to bring in the new functionality and keep everything else running, too. Like I'm just sitting on my thumbs and need some incentive.
So irritated. I'm supposed to be reviewing my contract, but I'm going to wait until I stop feeling so stabby.
Since last year, I've gone from being an integral figure in any planning or management effort, to an afterthought. In a lot of ways, this has been fantastic: I don't have to think about 95% of the IT stuff I used to have to care about. There is now just one thing I have to do: keep the business management system going, and make improvements as requested.
One might think that a major change to a set of fundamental business processes managed by my system might be cause to bring me into the introductory discussions to discover things like the amount of work required, and reasonable schedules for development and testing for all these changes. But that didn't happen.
Instead, when a situation arose that would bring in-house the entire testing protocol of another company, I wasn't brought into the discussions until the very last minute, when I was told that I had about four months to make all the required changes. After making a very aggressive (and patently unreasonable) project plan to accomplish this in the given time, I was then told that we needed to make about half of the outlined functionality work within a month.
I was told they would start with a small subset of the total range of tests after that first month, only small animals, and that they would only send a few at a time. The full range wouldn't be expected until after I had been able to make all the needed changes months down the road. Instead, the partner company stopped all in-house testing and put the entire load on us, three months early. Then they came unglued when the test results they got weren't 100% correct, resulting in two long lectures to me from upper management about how important the project is, all suddenly caring about testing cycles and release schedules.
After the first crazy mad month of building, I've spent the last two months playing catch-up and putting out fires. When I warned my clients that I wasn't able to keep to the schedule due to the changes in the project, the president of the company suggested that they should limit my pay until I finished the projects as outlined. This alone nearly made me walk. I told them in no uncertain terms that this would never happen. I am contracted hourly because I am the expert, and the only person on the planet who knows how this system works. I was not about to let them piece-meal my contract away.
If they had brought me in to the conversation early, saying that they had these things they wanted to do and wanted my opinion about how quickly things could be changed, I would have been able to give them some pretty comfortable and reasonable plans. If they had, I could see holding some personal obligation to keep to such schedules. But it wasn't my decision to take on this business, it wasn't my decision to accept an abbreviated schedule, and it wasn't my decision to choose to work on this rather than the rather extensive list of known issues already in the system. My deal is that they pay me an hourly rate for every hour I work for them, regardless of what I'm working on.
So I get this bonus addendum on my contract and it seriously makes me want to tear the whole thing up. Oh, look: some extra cash if I can magically make a deadline I've already said twice isn't going to happen because the partner company didn't follow the rules. As if I hadn't already been working at 100% to bring in the new functionality and keep everything else running, too. Like I'm just sitting on my thumbs and need some incentive.
So irritated. I'm supposed to be reviewing my contract, but I'm going to wait until I stop feeling so stabby.