Part 3 of 5 - The Lions Pit

Managing uncertainty on critically important projects is akin to that of being thrown into the proverbial Lions pit. You never know if the lions will eat you or if God will come to your rescue. It still happens to this day and it is shocking, surprising, and very painful! Like my biblical namesake, Daniel, who believed he had the trust of King Nebuchadnezzar (whose dream he had successfully interpreted - with God’s help); I too believed I had gained the Client’s trust when I jump-started the GSM Portal project where all others had failed. It would be weeks later where I would come to realise how fragile trust can be – especially when manipulated.

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Uncertainty management, considered to be a black art in project management, is the preparation and management of unanticipated occurrences in projects (it should not be confused with Risk Management, risks can be anticipated). Experienced Project Managers employ scenario creating techniques based upon situations they have previously encountered. They create hypothesis, and extrapolate all data on all that can happen and often does happen. Theatre directors do this all the time when they need to “work something up” using strata to build complexity – that is what my friend Sir Trevor says. By analysing (breaking down components, assessing threat and opportunity levels, project managers can build various contingency strata into uncertainty scenarios) we model all complexities (the common source for uncertainty), then store them in the project bible.

You may think this geeky or bit of an overkill, but consider for a moment that you do not know as much about the project as you believe. Consider that your not knowing could lead to project failure or delivery of a poor system - even though it is on time and within budget. Then consider your responsibility to prevent those common occurrences.

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Every Tuesday afternoon the GSM Portal project includes a weekly taskforce meeting. I attend regularly, representing my organisation. I have always believed that the more prepared you are, then the better you can deliver. From my hotel club-suite at the Sheraton Zagreb (which by the way I had turned part of it into my very own strategic bunker) I thought I would be prepared for any and every eventuality. I was, but you know, the best laid plans and all that. Something can always go wrong … and it did.

Arriving at the taskforce meeting I normally hold a quick catch-up chit-chat with the IT Director on the Client side. This time our normal verbal exchange is side tracked to technical issues. The Director is concerned about the setup progress of the development environment and (news to me) setup of the staging environment. He appeared edgy, and well, pungent with negativity. Something was not quite right. In the large cavernous conference room, situated around a very large oaken oval table, there are some unusually empty chairs. The Marketing Manager arrives, closely followed by the Head of Marketing. There is some shuffling as two or three other members of the weekly taskforce take their places. We skip on actions from the last minutes of the meeting, as Marketing requested. Something was definitely very very wrong.

The Marketing Manager pounces first, throwing at me a set of sharp tipped questions. They are questions that I do not know the answer to because they are set in the distant past before I arrived on the project. Never-the-less, the client continues to “string me up” and I find myself on a rope dangling head downwards into the Lion’s pit. By the time the Marketing Manager has finished all accusations, joined by the Head of Marketing, my organisation is held to blame for everything that has gone wrong with the client’s project, since day one! The client demands compensation in the form of additional features – not in the project scope. They have hard copy evidence of my organisation’s short-comings and they bring out the Lions to feast.

The meeting goes on longer than normal. IBM’s Technical Director delivers several scathing attacks, rolling off evidence with dates. Without relent he explains that they had paid for my team to attend the TISM PTK training (for example) and that the team had not attended. This meant that my organisation was now responsible for the delays to the project – because the staging environment had not been setup, and therefore this would impact delivery of the production environment. The Client IT Director sealed my fate as he began cutting through the rope. “… No staging environment, then you have developed nothing - at least nothing we can see”.

With no real answers to the stinging accusations, I remembered that, “against overwhelming odds retreat, but leave a warning sign”. I knew well, as did the Client that the staging environment was not the responsibility of my organisation. They wanted one of the teams to carry out systems integration for the entire project – at reduced cost. Very calmly, I reiterated from my notes the accusations levied against my organisation. I fully agreed with the client that I had no real answer to their questions – and I steered clear from giving any unsupportable answers. Yet, I did leave them with something to think about, “I trust that I will not find all you have said, to be not what it appears.” I smiled and thanked them as I normally do for the meeting and departed.
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What do you think happened next? What would you have done in this situation? How do you think you could deliver the largest and most recognised project in Eastern Europe after that?

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