Bad Decisions Compounded

I was scheduled to return to Bangalore last Sunday but then came the attacks in Mumbai so I delayed it for a week. I don't think there is any real danger to me in B'lore but I suppose it is better to be safe.

But that isn't what I want to talk about. In my last posting, I expressed my dismay at the short sightedness of my client, penny-wise and pound foolish really are at play here. I have been trying to get my head around the quality aspects of the project and as one might expect, I have been reviewing countless bugs. Yesterday it struck me that I wasn't seeing the entire picture; sure enough, when I asked about it I was told that a few weeks back, the Excel spreadsheet that was being used to track issues had gotten too big so they archived all the closed issues. If you are like me that is like discounting all American history up until World War I. How can you understand a project when you ignore the first 50% of its history?

I am just dumbfounded that due to a "managerial" decision not to use a real issue tracking tool there continues to be bad project management on a project of this scale.