27th
J'accuse, or, How I Hate Scope Creep, or, You Get What You Ask For
So. I just spent a good week or so lovingly building a financial forecasting and pacing model in Excel that tracks to-date pay actually incurred vs. projected based on budget.
It’s a beautiful thing with a very simple summary page that belies the complexity of the formula-laden input sheet. The whole thing is dynamic and wonderfully easy to digest for the end user. Just add in each week’s production totals, and just like magic, all the actuals and projections will recalculate to reflect the number of weeks closed.
Except now, I have to go back and change the whole damn model all over again.
This is what sucks about people: they do not know how to scope out and write product requirements.
What happened was that the model’s users realized after the fact that not all products are created equal. Some cost more, some cost less, depending on whether said products are produced on a weekday or a weekend day.
This means not only changing the model, but changing how the weekly production reports are pulled so as to differentiate among weekday and weekend day production.
I totally understand now why software developers resent their companies’ clients. Because clients can’t decide on what they want.
