Schedule Stories

I recently removed myself from a project that had a lack of courage. The defining trait was, "we can't tell the customer THAT!" They were afraid of the customer's reaction to bad news and went to great lengths to hide problems.

My experience, of course, is that customers are not demons and will work with you if you're honest and forthcoming. And they'll figure it out eventually, so you're far better off telling them now than later.

Based on other posts I've seen, this is not an uncommon problem, and it's just as crippling as a lack of feedback, communication, or simplicity.

So... anyone here have success in turning this situation around? Have you convinced a fearful project manager to tell the customer the truth? How did you do it?

-- JimLittle

No, but I have had failure in that. Toward the end of C3, our team manager literally said "I can't tell Pat that", referring to his boss, when we told him that the schedule wasn't what "they" wanted it to be. That meant that the word did not filter up to our sponsor, the CIO. In the end, she cancelled the project.

In retrospect, it might have been better for me, or someone else who didn't really give a darn, to jump around a few levels of management and go see the CIO. At the time it seemed prudent not to do that.

-- RonJeffries

An approach that worked for me once was to change the view of what was happening in my bosses head from "concealment of things that would upset the customer" to "we're lying to the customer".

For example I said that it wouldn't be a good idea for me to go to a progress meeting with a stakeholder because I'm not good at lying to peoples faces. Whenever the topic of the customers view of progress came up in a meeting I would comment that we were effectively lying to the customer. Etc.

After about two weeks of this (and others on the team doing the same thing) it suddenly seemed to click in the bosses head that the lie was going to upset the customer a lot more than an unpalatable truth.

No idea if this would work in another situation.

--AdrianHoward

A colleague and I were consulting to a brand new company that had been formed from a small company in Oregon and a small department of a giant corporation in The Netherlands. The two organizations had partnered for several years before the merger. My colleague and I were invited to observe the three-day planning meeting for their inaugural project.

At lunch on the first day, as I was sitting down at the table, everyone at the table began talking at once. "We have a huge problem..." "The managers don't understand..." "They don't want to hear reality..." The essence was that the company had huge problems that were not being addressed, there was no way in hell the project would deliver in the timeframe the managers had been talking about all morning, and the managers just didn't want to hear it. And, they said, "You have to tell them!" I tried to persuade these people to speak up for themselves during the meetings. A few said, halfheartedly, that maybe they would try.

Two minutes later, my colleague, who had been sitting at another table, came running over and said, "You won't believe what I'm hearing!" Well, I believed it, because we were hearing the same thing.

After lunch, my colleague and I took the primary manager for a walk. We said that we're hearing concerns that people are afraid to raise. We negotiated with the manager to hold a session that evening to create an anonymous way for people to raise the issues. We said, "People will be paying very close attention to how you react to their issues," and checked several times to make sure that the manager really wanted to do this.

At the evening session, we gave everyone identical 5x8 cards and identical pens. We asked them to write their issues on the cards. (And we asked that everyone write /something/, even if they didn't have any issues to raise. If they didn't have an issue, they could write "I don't have any issues to raise." That way, nobody could watch who was writing to determine who had an issue and who didn't.)

My colleague and I gathered the cards, shuffled them, read them, and ripped them into tiny pieces. The managers (there were three or four in the room), listened. Mostly, they agreed that the issues were significant issues. There was some discussion about some of the issues, and we were careful not to make any attempt to identify who had raised each issue initially.

The next day, we accounted for the issues as we constructed the schedule. The delivery date was 18 months away. The managers were distressed, as they'd wanted to deliver in nine months. The team tried to negotiate smaller scope, but each time they agreed that "that feature is absolutely necessary." In the end, everyone in the room agreed that, yep, 18 months was the best estimate.

At that point, the managers said, "I don't know what we're going to tell the CEO when we report to him tomorrow." Again, my colleague and I [ed.note: some text dropped here] But given that everyone was going to be in the room, they couldn't very well give a rosy estimate to the CEO without losing credibility with the team.

So, on the following day, they told the CEO the straight story. Afterward, we rode with the CEO to dinner. He said, "Well, I don't know what I'm going to tell the stockholders." It seems that everybody was afraid to tell the truth to somebody.

Unfortunately, the CEO told the stockholders "nine months." Within six months, all but one of the Oregon team members had quit.

But we had a few days of honesty. I gotta think that counts for something.

-- DaleEmery

Much of the above -- and a good portion of the corporate financial scandals of the past couple of years -- can be traced to one belief:

If you don't tell the stakeholders about the problems now they may go away later and save you grief.

The corollary, of course, is that if the problems don't go away, they usually become worse. Accounting irregularities mushroom into accounting fraud. A project that is a month behind schedule becomes a year behind. And, making matters worse, the boss/customers/authorities usually loathe having been deceived.

Honesty is usually the best policy. When it's not (i.e. management is looking for an excuse to kill the project) it is often prudent to find a better situation to be in.

The above scenario is common enough to have earned a picture by despair.com: http://www.despair.com/flattery.html

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