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What you don’t see can kill you
Pay attention to this if you who manage major projects. This post may save your life….well, maybe just your job.
I’ve launched a fair number of these in my day - enough so that I’ve seen a few get screwed up. Maybe it’s my track record of failures (note to future employers; I’m really not that bad), but I’ve developed a sort of sixth sense to to alert me when something’s not quite right. I’ve learned to trust these vague oncerns because they’re always right.
As I’ve said before, there’s an entropy about projects, a natural tendency for things to fall apart. The question is how to prevent this.You can think you’ve done everything right and covered all the bases, when some major disconnect suddenly threatens the whole project’s success. The problem with this kind of issue is that it’s by definition something everyone thinks is fine but where different parties have different understandings.
In a recent case, I was working with IT to see how our site was going to back into a new enterprise software (ES) backend. Some initial warning flags were raised for me when I heard the lead architect saying that navigation would be managed from the new software. This would mean the website would be restricted to the same IA as the customer service desk, even though very different users and a lot more marketing content on the Web.
I immediately tried to run this down, escalated the questions, and got back a reply that ‘the ES is just plumbing. You can do whatever you want on the site.’ Now the old me would have accepted this at face value and assumed all well. The present me felt those neck hairs sending a warning still and didn’t accept that answer. Sure enough, we saw a document just the other day showing navigation controlled in the ES. If I hadn’t kept my guard up so high on this, we might not have discovered the disconnect until late in the game. Somewhere down the line, we would have realized we were stuck with the wrong IA. This would throw a major wrench into the project that could undermine the whole investment, and I’d be the one looking incompetent. I hate that.
This example highlights both the danger and the solution. Never accept anything at face value. If you have any question, run it down even when people assure you all’s well (even if they patronize you for asking dumb questions - there’s no such thing!). And make sure terms are defined explicitly, so no differing definitions can put a hole in your hull (getting back into my ship analogy).
It’s the assumption you don’t see that you run aground on, and the hardest thing to recognize is what you don’t see or can’t tell. When you’re in a fast moving project, you make unconscious decisions every day to accept information at face value. You’re too busy, after all, to chase down every detail. But just remember, today’s detail is tomorrow’s
bonus down the drain. Stay alert and trust your instincts.
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