Monday-fucking-morning

What do I hate about Mondays? There is a lot to detest at the start of the week.

Typcially, Mondays start with a "work in progress' meeting. Otherwise known as "The WIP" or unkindly as the "Whip" .

In some agencies, this is a great way to work out what everyone is working on,  how the project is progressing, and what other work is coming up. Nothing like being part of a team that's moving forward where you voice is heard and respected. That's a simplistic view on how a good commercial design practice is run. 

Back in the real world, things couldn't be further from that! Firstly, we tend not to do 'wips'  anymore. Especially in digital design where there is a managerial obsession with 'granularity'. Nowadays,  we are subjected to the "Stand up Meeting" -  basically another bullshit title for what should be described as "quick meeting, so tossers can't drone on about irrelevant shit too much'. And rather than doing them once a week and just getting on with the work, we do them "every fucking day" usually at a time like 10:30 because account managers are too lazy to get in before 10:00.

This is part of the fallout of 'methodology du jour' called 'Agile'  (where they are known as 'Scrums') which everone is getting a hardon over. It also goes hand in hand with marketers wet dream "Social Media" (more on that later). Agile is supposedly the panacea of all our ills, where we concentrate more on doing and less on talking about doing. One would assume that that this would result in account managers fucking leave us alone to get on with it. However, the kicker is, Agile is implemented on a company level by the people its supposed to exclude, so no matter what people say, its just another long line of 'process tools'.

Honestly, clients, if you want to "be Agile", leave the agencies alone and just hire the designer and developer directly...and stay the fuck away from advertising agencies, they're shit at it.

This week is looking like a 'good-un' though. Management are dragging my sorry arse along to a meeting with a potential client. Already, the fire-fighting will commence, where I will attempt to introduce some shred of reality into a project which has been overbloated with the hype and outlandish promises from the account managers, who, not having to actually deliver anything, are free to promise absolutely everthing with impunity.

Plenty of opportunity too for management to get me to 'output some jpegs' for his new shittastic powerpoint presentation. No doubt upload some "moody shots of my feet" I took over the weekend to my flickr page at some point  and maybe "rehash some links i found on other sites" and present them as my own on my blog.

Good times.