It's always a challenge balancing "What's the right thing to do?" with "What's the right thing to do right now?". Age and experience certaingly gives a much more rounded perspective. (I reflect on Younger Me as being much more black and white about what's right and wrong. It gets more nuanced with age...)
This story does beg many questions about culture and leadership for the environment, let alone the commercial question on having the (presumably significant?) overall program burn rate ticking along while your client bided their time... but an interesting story nonetheless.
Thank you for sharing and looking forward to the next installment.
The burn of the overall program is affected by the "slowest" team, because of dependencies. In this case, we were not the slowest team so we did not impact the overall timelines.
The alternative that I (naively?) had proposed was to just announce that we were going to be late as soon as I realized it. If we had done that, likely 2-3 other teams would have just replanned without saying anything because they were late too.
Nothing would have changed on overall timeline, just the "guilty party" would have been us.
Interesting
It's always a challenge balancing "What's the right thing to do?" with "What's the right thing to do right now?". Age and experience certaingly gives a much more rounded perspective. (I reflect on Younger Me as being much more black and white about what's right and wrong. It gets more nuanced with age...)
This story does beg many questions about culture and leadership for the environment, let alone the commercial question on having the (presumably significant?) overall program burn rate ticking along while your client bided their time... but an interesting story nonetheless.
Thank you for sharing and looking forward to the next installment.
The burn of the overall program is affected by the "slowest" team, because of dependencies. In this case, we were not the slowest team so we did not impact the overall timelines.
The alternative that I (naively?) had proposed was to just announce that we were going to be late as soon as I realized it. If we had done that, likely 2-3 other teams would have just replanned without saying anything because they were late too.
Nothing would have changed on overall timeline, just the "guilty party" would have been us.