In the course of developing a system for service calls of field technicians, one of the organization’s senior managers demanded that the system not allow a technician to report that he had begun handling the service call unless he is physically present at the geographic location of the call.
Reading between the lines makes it clear that the demand was really all about monitoring the trustworthiness of the technicians. He worried that a technician, who knows he is evaluated based on his response time when sent out on a service call, might report that he had begun handling a service call even though he had not in order to avoid failing the service metrics expected of him.
The demand was brought up in the steering committee meeting after the development of the system had already begun. The project manager examined the implication of the request on the project as a whole and discovered that the impact on the project’s scope would be minor, the complexity of the change would also be minor due to previous experience with such implementations and the cost would be low. Thus, there would be no risk associated with approving the requested change. However, the request failed the first-degree test—it simply was not compatible with the goals of the project. At no point during the development and specification stage—when the project’s goals and the client’s needs were determined—was monitoring the technicians’ trustworthiness defined as one of the goals.
Therefore, the steering committee was faced with two choices:
- To approve adding a new goal to the project; they must then examine the project to see if there are any other demands that arise out of the real goals of the project. If so, then the scope of the project must be changed accordingly.
- To reject the demand as incompatible with the goals of the project.
After evaluating the need for the change, the project manager decided that there was insufficient cause to add the change to the project. The senior manager insisted, however. He himself had arrived from another field of work—one that required transporting expensive goods that could only be offloaded at specific geographical destinations—and he imported the demand from his previous field of work into this one.
The project manager, whose role is to maintain project boundaries and to deliver the goals of the project, had to insist that the demand could not be accommodated. In order to convince the steering committee, the project manager told the following story:
Once upon a time, in a green city, lived a green man. The green man lived in a green house, with a green door, and green windows. He had a green wife and two green kids, and he would sleep in a green bed and dream green dreams. One bright green morning, this green man got up, put on his green pants, green shirt and green shoes. On his head, he wore a green hat and left the house. The green man got in his green car and drove on the green road at a green speed. On one side of the road the man saw a green sea, and on the other, a sea of green flowers. It was a beautiful day and the green man was happy, singing green songs and smoking a green cigarette with green smoke. Then, this green man saw a blue man standing on the side of the road. He stopped his green car and said to the blue man: ‘Hey there, blue man! What are you doing here?’ ‘Me?’ said the blue man, ‘I’m from another story.’
As a result, the steering committee was convinced that there was no need to add the demand from the “blue” story to the content of the “green” project and thus maintained the original boundaries of the project.
It is important to remember that focusing on the goal of the project requires being able to say “no.” Saying “yes” is very easy and very tempting—especially given circumstances such as those described above. However, as soon as the first unnecessary demand is accommodated—small as it may be—it will inevitably be followed by a second and a third… and the project has in fact already failed.
