Having problems with possibly the dumbest strategy of all time. It's difficult to work around because it comes from a management interrupt, and all my lands are tapped out. I've got nothing left to do except to sit around and watch bad things happen.
It's not the whole crew; it's a manager with a hand full of interrupts. I played just about all the design cards there are, but an interrupt is an interrupt, and I'm forced to respond to it.
As an architect, I see systems emerging from the interplay of requirements, context and solution cards. Currently, we have a solution on the table; I have to play an appropriate design to implement this solution. I've got the design in my hand, I'm just waiting until its my turn so that I can play it.
However, there's this whole side battle going on that (I hope) will eventually get an old, bad solution card off the table. This requires me to play an instant as soon as the DBA finishes her turn. Once she's done pooping around with the data model, I play this instant I've been holding and give her the revised enrichment rules, then it's her turn again to poop around with the data model. We have to do it this way because the whole solution is complex, and the best way to understand complexity is to grow it a step at a time rather than cope with it all at once.
Meanwhile, Project Leader has a "Brain Calorie Burn" that she is powering with every land she has. It's the "I don't need that detail in the data model, take it out" card. We spend hours crossing stuff off the model. Stuff that the DBA and I know we'll put back in. It doesn't save any development cost that I can see, but the card is out and we don't have any way to stop it. We take out details that, in the next release, will be put back in again.
Bottom Line. Rather than build new, simple, fast software, management is insisting on adaptation of existing, complex, slow software. Analyst and DBA were in my cube with the "how can you let them do this?" two-on-one. I said that we have to let folks do it this way; otherwise they'll just stand around in the barnyard like goats starting at thunder. They think of the broken software as an "investment" not the sunk cost it really is.