Road Kill

Road Kill.  You know, the dead animals you see on the highway that had the unfortunate luck to step out in front of a speeding car/truck and get hit.  It's not a pretty sight.  Over the course of the past 20+ years in IT I have felt like road kill a number of times.

Most projects have timelines that they need to live by.  Sometimes these timelines are arbitrary dates, sometimes they are based on business processes and cycles that need to be adhered to and occasionally, every so often, they are legislated dates that have a tremendous social and political implication if they are not met.  In those rare cases when you are working on a project like this it might seem like a death march, but it doesn't have to be.  This is where the role of Project Manager is particularly difficult:  how do you convince the staff to continue working on this project while at the same time telling the business client that the dates seem a little unrealistic?

I've been involved in a number of projects where the target date was just totally unrealistic.  It was way too aggressive for the amount of work that needed to be done with the resources that were available.  Putting more resources wasn't going to work due to the start up effort associated with new staff and the decrease in productivity of existing staff as they helped out the newbie.  Working longer hours wasn't going to help because the team was already working 50%+ overtime.  This is where project managers bring out the Successories posters and try to motivate the staff with short little quotes.  I've even had project managers blatantly lie to me about the project:  "You'll only have to work overtime for the next four weeks and then we're back on schedule"  (It took six months) 

At the end of the six months I felt like road kill.  Most of the staff felt like road kill.  This didn't have to happen.  This didn't have to turn out the way it did.  The timeline was set in place by the client but, you know what?  It was flexible.  They wanted a specific implementation date so that they could start showing a return on investment for the application.  They were doing it so that it would have a bigger impact on the current years year end report.  Our management, so intent on pleasing the client, burnt out a considerable number of staff and presented an image to the local IT community of a bad place to work.

Sometimes you need to step back and take a look at what you're doing and see if it makes sense.  In my case it didn't.  Your case may be different.  If there isn't a hard and fast deadline that you need to meet, err on the side of the people and adjust the schedule.  Losing staff may be worse for your project than implementing late.