I've read a large amount of speculation about General Motors over the past few weeks but nothing floors me like the rumor that Pontiac will be scrubbed. I discovered this ugly rumor while posting updates on my auto racing site and to be honest I think opinion is knee jerk.

Sure GM needs to reduce the badge count but is Pontiac really on its death bed? As one commentator pointed out Pontiac has just released several new rear wheel drive (RWD) models based around the GM Zeta platform. I for one applaud the return to affordable RWD vehicles and can easily see Pontiac as the poor man's performance arm of GM. On the other hand I can't see the value of Oldsmobile or GMC. Olds in particular lives up to its name as I know of no one under 60 who drives one these days. GMC, on the other hand, is a venerable brand but shares a lot of crossover with the GM line. In fact I can't name one unique vehicle off hand and doubt many Americans could either.

Regardless of what happens to Pontiac and the like, GM has a real image problem. Though Peter De Lorenzo declares the image war over GM has failed to back down its campaign to win the hearts and minds of Americans. Recently they launched a quasi-wiki site (GM Facts and Fiction) that addresses nasty rumors and outright untruth's about the business. Still it's going to be hard sell to folks especially the market segment that was born after GM began it's slow decline.

So what do you think? Is Pontiac legitimately on the chopping block and if not who is?

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Holy hell! It's been a rough five days at work but at least we are near the finish line. Over the past few days I've been working nonstop to deploy a third party integration for our CRM product which, by all accounts, has been the most convoluted process ever. While I'd like to think that I'm being melodramatic, I can not say that I'm exaggerating. Though the technical problems were solved the remainder of the solution, which we outsourced to a contractor, was not fully documented nor fully tested. This created a huge, nightmarish workload for us as we attempted to roll out the solution.

The moral of the story is that while it's beneficial to have outside help when accomplishing project goals it's imperative to keep the deliverable items static and well documented as possible. If your goal is to hit a moving target and then distill the information into a meaningful document you need to keep very detailed notes and to be very organized. If your vendor or contractor does not exhibit these traits then odds are you will end up with a huge mess when it's time to deploy your project.

Having written a lot of code and having worked on many projects I can honestly say that the greatest skill a software developer can possess is not coding proficiency, but a knack for organization. Regardless of whether you practice traditional development or iterative design you still need to maintain order in both code writing and project documentation. While code can be self documenting application function and business processes often are not. When you skimp on explanation about what a program or system is supposed to be doing you risk unintentionally breaking things when changes are made. You also further complicate the process or sunsetting those systems if their role is not explicitly apparent.

At the end of the day I'd rather work with and have work outsourced to developers who are able to document their work and the processes they seek to improve. Anything less means more work for us coders and more confusion and hand wringing for our bosses.

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It's been a long week writing code, writing design documents and generally trying to keep up with life. We had a nice rain this week so I'm looking forward to cutting my now green lawn and picking a few more fresh vegetables from the garden. I've also resolved to finally upload the pirate weekend pictures to flickr, which I haven't done yet.

Speaking of pirate weekends it's hard to believe that it's nearly Labor Day and time, again, to head to the beach for fun, sun and crab fishing. After my last trip I think I've hit onto something with the raunchy bait and fully expect to freeze even more crab Sunday night. If my luck holds out the Captain may even be in town for a little sailing action.

Technology can bring out the best and the worst in people. Recently my team released a few upgrades that laid the ground work for a future overhaul. Though the change was minor we couldn't make it without affected some users. Despite the impact, the change was deemed more important than the temporary discomfort of a few folks and the was given the "green light" for release.

Changes rarely go 100% as expected and this change was no different. In the end a few key features were unavailable for longer than we'd anticipated though ultimately information was not lost, only delayed. This was still unacceptable to a few who vocally made their displeasure known. Of these "complaints" only two were truly related to the problem with the rest falsely correlated with the upgrade. In other words most of the problems weren't a result of our change but that didn't stop people from blaming it anyway.

Users are funny like that and we in the IT development and support field find it comical at first, but it can quickly become a nightmare if you don't set the record straight immediately. In our case a quick email blurb informed everyone that the problem was isolated and would only delay things, not destroy them. For most this was enough, unfortunately for a few others it did little to reassure them nor to reinforce my belief that users actually read system status bulletins. In my opinion if it isn't a 5"x7" flashing yellow warning sign that pops up when you first log in someone will miss the "memo".

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