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What do you think an IC is doing when they walk into a room full of managers and declare the project they're managing is horribly mismanaged?

by duped 4y ago

pjc50 4y ago
Delivering information. Now, it takes a lot of company culture work to make it safe to actually deliver that, but you have to choose: do you want to have some awkward meetings, or some awkward subpoenas?
jrockway 4y ago
Presumably you're conveying the results of your research, which means new facts are on the table that the "mismanagers" weren't previously aware of. They assigned you that research work presumably because they wanted to know those facts. Now that you're showing up with useful information, they can go back and deliver an even better estimate of the project than they had before. If you show up and are like "hey idiots, you fucked up the estimate, man you're dumb" then, sure, people will react negatively. If you show up and say "you were right that we needed to look into this more; we found 9 months of work we hadn't incorporated into the plan" then they're going to have a lot of work to do, but they probably aren't going to be unhappy about being in a position of higher certainty. To some extent, it's not really different from what engineers do. Are you mad when there's a production outage? No. You just debug it and mitigate it. Project planning is no different; new facts are on the table, and the plan has to change. Changing the plan is a lot of work, and that's why project management is a dedicated profession. They can now go do their job better with the data that you collected. No reason to be mad.
jalla 4y ago
I've been naive like that a few times. I managed to get away unharmed most times but once I was publicly blamed for the project's failure by the incompetent managers, in a governmental organisation. I overestimated people's honesty in the face of their own career death. I considered blowing the whistle or taking them to court for slander but I had strong doubts I could clear my name as power corrupts.

What do you think an IC is doing when they walk into a room full of managers and declare the project they're managing is horribly mismanaged?

by duped 4y ago

What do you think an IC is doing when they walk into a room full of managers and declare the project they're managing is horribly mismanaged?

pjc50 4y ago

Delivering information. Now, it takes a lot of company culture work to make it safe to actually deliver that, but you have to choose: do you want to have some awkward meetings, or some awkward subpoenas?

jrockway 4y ago

Presumably you're conveying the results of your research, which means new facts are on the table that the "mismanagers" weren't previously aware of. They assigned you that research work presumably because they wanted to know those facts. Now that you're showing up with useful information, they can go back and deliver an even better estimate of the project than they had before. If you show up and are like "hey idiots, you fucked up the estimate, man you're dumb" then, sure, people will react negatively. If you show up and say "you were right that we needed to look into this more; we found 9 months of work we hadn't incorporated into the plan" then they're going to have a lot of work to do, but they probably aren't going to be unhappy about being in a position of higher certainty. To some extent, it's not really different from what engineers do. Are you mad when there's a production outage? No. You just debug it and mitigate it. Project planning is no different; new facts are on the table, and the plan has to change. Changing the plan is a lot of work, and that's why project management is a dedicated profession. They can now go do their job better with the data that you collected. No reason to be mad.

jalla 4y ago

I've been naive like that a few times. I managed to get away unharmed most times but once I was publicly blamed for the project's failure by the incompetent managers, in a governmental organisation. I overestimated people's honesty in the face of their own career death. I considered blowing the whistle or taking them to court for slander but I had strong doubts I could clear my name as power corrupts.