CHAPTER 12 The Design of People
It hit hard because I had been working 70–80 hours a week and giving
it my all in an environment that was as dysfunctional as a chimpanzee
community with two alphas. We were understaffed, overspent, under
tremendous pressure from the market, in the crosshairs of the CEO and, to
make matters worse, I was fresh out of college and learning the ropes. And
I was pretty green: that’s software industry-speak for naive. In a nutshell,
the project had gone to hell, and I was the perfect fall guy.
“I don’t know what I need to do to fix things anymore. I need you to
walk me through this,” I said with resignation to John. Begrudgingly —
after all, he was burning the candle at both ends, too, and really didn’t have
time to deal with his pesky employees. He started making a list of action
items for me on the whiteboard. One of them was: Fix ownership column
for each milestone in status report. Each milestone in the status report
was to have one clear owner. One could debate the true owner for many of
the milestones, and my default in such situations was to list myself as the
owner. I was, after all, ultimately responsible for getting the project out the
gate. So, when we missed a milestone, it was generally seen as my fault.
And I didn’t care.
“You don’t own anything. You have no control over when one of those
items is late or on track. You only have influence. Ultimately, someone
else is responsible for each of those pieces, and you simply need to report
their progress toward completion of their line-item,” said John matter-of-
factly. He instructed me to remove my name from the owner column for
approximately twenty-five of the milestones my status report tracked.
I cringed.
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this. In fact, I’d rejected these words
from the leading project management books. I philosophically disagreed
with the tactic because, from a practical perspective, I reasoned, it
simply shifted blame and generally ignored seeking out a solution to the
overarching problem: the project had gone off the rails.
But things change when you have a gun to your head.