Project Management
I joined a fast expanding IT company (read web developers) as the project manager. This placed me on the small management team and I had to account for the work of the 15 developer/designers/SEO/QA etc staff.

Unfortunately the MD wanted half daily updates. They also wanted everything setup and managed in MS project 2000 (new at the time).

Now it should be plainly obvious that when you sell a website for say £3k which amounts to about 35 hours of company time and then divide that between sales, design, programming, QA etc that it's not much time at all! e.g. developers would have perhaps 3-4 hours to design 2 or 3 mockups for a site then fully develop the chosen one to a final design.

So now try asking a team of young IT peeps to update you TWICE A DAY as to how much time they've spent on each client.

Long story short, by the time you've entered into MS project and realised there is a problem it's too late. Pretty much every project ran over schedule for which I got the blame.

I claimed he was asking for an impractical level of time management by people who had now concept of their own time planning or the incentives to help the company. They went bust about 3 years after I left.
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Fri 5 Jan 2007, 14:56, Reply)