In a somewhat related adventure, I am scheduled to give a talk soon (hopefully the same talk twice) about managing a security assessment project. I am hearing a

In a somewhat related adventure, I am scheduled to give a talk soon (hopefully the same talk twice) about managing a security assessment project. I am hearing about this same sort of beheading happening in the infosec departments from various clients. The impact on me, personally, is that my client contacts are stretched so thin that they don't have cycles to prepare and make the best use of my time. I'm planning to have handouts with checklists. So this topic has been very much on my mind, lately. One of the things I've learned from Tom is to keep track of how I spend my time. It is tedious and frustrating, but not unlike dieting: without data, you just have no proof. If I had found myself in the situation that the OP describes, my first reaction would have been to keep a running log of every task I had done, including start/stop time and a description of the work done. I've written scripts to do this in the past that generate PDF timesheets -- you could probably use Trac somehow. I'd keep this stuff on a device I owned, and bring the logs to my reviews. Yes, this adds to the stress. Yes, you'll get criticized for it. But when someone who has no clue why the carpets are always clean starts swinging that axe, you'll be wearing armor.