As Jobs puts it ‘we can only connect the dots afterwards’.
That’s the benefit of hindsight? Well, if you have that as foresight, it makes
you a visionary. Las Vegas was just a desert till one guy redrew the map
toasting success on the sand dunes, and Vegas couldn’t have been just
conjecture then.
When I took over the reins, the project looked promising.
Communications were open and the client very forthcoming in comments. One look at
the team composition and my hopes were inflated: a trusted hand, a familiar
figure and a total stranger, rest of the crew comprised of tester, Us Ex, web
developer. The lead developer is more of a man-Friday as we have engaged in
couple of projects and hence a tried and tested chap. It looked good and should
have soared to great. We could spot the shore. If wishes were horses then
beggars would ride!
We prepared the plan, sized the effort, scoped the
requirement, and swung into action. The progress too was pretty much in line.
We built a good rapport with the client and the stinkers were sporadic. The
plan and progress almost matched with some slippage. A qualified tester got
onboard and it was a shot in the arm. I had several sessions with the team and joint
calls with client in understanding the requirement.
The long evenings, late nights, brainstorming sessions,
soaring rhetoric and sizzling arguments, and not to miss the cat-fights, we saw
it all as a team. The phone would suddenly scream followed by a volley of
questions growing in decibel, and my team mate would politely hush her husband
‘I will be leaving in 5 minutes’. Remarkably, she taught me what I can never
achieve no matter how much ever I aspire – that patience and politeness in
answering an agitated call.
Perplexingly the problems and posers kept piling, and from
then on, we prioritized issues as critical, major and minor with color red,
yellow and orange respectively. An open document was created and shared with
client. And the bug count closely monitored with status reports both at start
and end of day. The fixes left me vexed; flummoxed by failure after failure as
I knew for sure that the bugs will be reopened. I chewed my finger nails
all the way to my knuckles and went bone dry when the count refused to climb
down. We dragged out weary souls and worn-out soles day-in and day-after
licking defeat in the hope that ‘we lost the battle but will win the war’.
The client is not to be blamed completely as for the team
goofed up pretty bad in managing the scope. A little here and a little there
and the result wasn't scope creep but a bloated scope with too many ‘bells and
whistles’. It wasn't the foot in my mouth but the whole leg. Chewed more than
we could swallow? It wasn't time to wallow in self-pity. But I couldn't help
feeling sorry for the team; for myself and then DH Lawrence hit me hard where
it hurts the most ‘I have never known a wild animal feel sorry for itself’. May
be I am ‘domestic’ – heck, man is a social animal, if it can be used as a
disclaimer. The client squeezing hard and the management make it clear about
the climbing cost, the noose was tightening. The stakeholders had a simple
mandate – the timeline. Problems and philosophy are a pair. When you muck-up
big time, be prepared for your back to be blackened. But as they say if the
progress is as per the plan, then there is something wrong with the plan. Then
why plan? [we will discuss as a different thread]
Tell me something, only Results count? Is it? I checked this
quote by Jacob Riis who, it seems, coined it for me.
“When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter
hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack
showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I
know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before” - Jacob
Riis.
Results count but efforts can’t be discounted.
We narrowed down the action-items as in-scope’ and passed it
around, armed ourselves with facts and figures as counterweight. We
managed to complete the project but not in the prospect and promise we had
pinned our hopes, rather it was mixed-feeling of bitter-sweet that the final
handover happened. Post the delivery, when we did the causal analysis, the
scope creep sank our boat. Expectedly CRs (Change Request) were raised but they
were either counted in as ‘courtesy’ or ‘cost-free’ who didn’t treat it binding
as billable.
It was a lesson learnt about clearly recording your scope
and securing a sign-off on the deliverables and we became more conscious and
cautious about the creep in succeeding projects. It was indeed a slippery
slope!
Join our PMP Certification program to learn more about countering scope creep. For further information, click http://goo.gl/9XoB5W to know more.
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