The Change Control Board (CCB) is made up of Business Stakeholders, Project and Program Managers, IT Leads, and monkeys. The purpose of the CCB is to manage overall project scope, or de-scope, in this case. To submit a scope change to the CCB for review, the requestor is required to submit a formal ‘Change Request,’ otherwise known as a ‘CR.’ The past two weeks presented a series of deficiencies with the CCB process:

• There is no end date to submitting CRs; meaning, changes can occur throughout development and testing phases, making the overall project very difficult to manage.
• The CR process is being abused, based on the lack of skill set and knowledge of how to support a business requirement.
• A CR is required for any change to anything. That includes changing fonts from Times New Roman to Arial Narrow on project documents;
• Everyone on the project team keeps their own version of a CR log without sharing it with others and they proceed with the change anyway;
• Sending a CR to someone’s admin does not constitute communication and approval of the change; and
• Having to submit a CR to move whiteboards from one war-room to the next is not okay.

Needless to say, my boss and I had a field day, or week, rather, having to deal with the CCB’s non-sense. The CCB is nothing more than yet another layer of bureaucracy in the world of Project Management. We gave it a fair shot in the beginning, but refused to sit in a CCB Review meeting to discuss what side of the screen an ‘ENTER’ button should sit on or to dig through our overspent budget to support the move of whiteboards. We stopped attending and left it up to the monkeys to notify us of any changes being submitted that was worth our time. This, of course, bit us in the ass.

According to the project schedule, we were in the testing phase. All testing failed due to missing business rules and key functionality. When we asked why these things were missing, we were told, CRs were submitted to the CCB to defer these pieces until a later date. They basically de-scoped the project without filling us in. Why? Because their dev teams in India weren’t working to observe some religious holiday week and their on-shore dev teams were too busy working on personal hot chili recipes for blue-ribbon submission in a fucking strawberry fair. Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?

My boss and I spent the latter part of Friday afternoon to write-up and submit our formal and final change request:

CHANGE REQUESTED: Stop the CCB Process.

REASON FOR CHANGE: It sucks ass.

IMPACT TO PROJECT: Our own sanity.

IMPACT IF CHANGE NOT IMPLEMENTED: Do you recall where the term “postal” came from?

There’s a CCB Review meeting next Tuesday. Let’s see how this goes over. In the meantime, I'm taking the weekend off to refresh and recharge. Yes, that includes high consumption of alcohol and getting laid. I *heart* my job.