Story: “It would be career limiting..."

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Story: “It would be career limiting..." Harry E. 2022-11-04

I spent about 18 months working on a doomed project. For a lot of that time, I thought I was the only one who realized it was doomed.

It was a big, multi-year project. I was hired on as an individual contributor maybe 15 months before the project was to be delivered to the customer, and it took me awhile to get my bearings. But after a few months, it really seemed to me that (a) we were not moving along as fast as the project manager Gantt charts said we had to, (b) we were doing a lot of tasks that weren’t even on the Gantt charts, and (c) we hadn’t even received all of the specifications from the customer that we would need to complete the project. Bad estimates for the work we had, lots of work that hadn’t been estimated, and incomplete requirements – the project sure seemed doomed to me.

Over time, I made more and more noise about this to an ever-growing number of people. A couple of other folks felt the same way and also made noise.

About a year into my employment, management got tired of the noise, so they tried, as far as I can tell, to subvert us by giving us responsibility: they said OK, you trio of rabble-rousers are now an Architecture Board. You’re in charge of doing a technical review of the architecture, and in particular identifying work that’s missing from the official project plans. Report back in a few weeks.

Nominally empowered, we set out to do just that. We pieced together what we knew about the architecture and the work plan from our individual roles in the rapidly-growing, nearly-200 person project, and then went and asked a lot of people a lot of questions. When we were done, we scheduled a meeting to deliver our final report. At the meeting were the overall program manager, three project managers, ten development managers, and a handful of other managers as well. It was to this crowd that we presented our results.

What we told them was this: we had discovered a lot of work that wasn’t on the official project Gantt chart. A lot of work. In fact, we had discovered about an extra 9 months of work. Not, to be clear, 9 person months – we had found 9 calendar months of work for the 200+ person project. And that was assuming the client got us the rest of the specs in a timely manner and they didn’t contain any landmines.

Once we had let that sink in with the managers, we further suggested that there was probably work we had not discovered. Finally, we made our primary recommendation, which was to slip the project 12 months to cover the newly-discovered work, and provide margin for any additional remaining work.

It felt great to deliver this report. Finally, we would all be aligned on the doomedness of the current project plan. Finally we would adjust our delivery schedule to match reality. That gnawing sense of futility and impending failure that I’d been feeling for 15 months would finally, today, get addressed. Well, that’s what I thought.

The managers absorbed our report in silence for a moment or two. And then one of them said “It would be career limiting if the client were to hear this.” And that was the end of that.

When the shock wore off, I felt freed. The doomed nature of the project didn’t trouble me anymore. I’d met my responsibility to the company – and the company had threatened me as a result.

I quit a few weeks later.

Two years later, the client canceled the two-years-late project before it ever launched. They ate a $60M loss.

Bet that manager’s still at the company, though.