Alternative Realities

I always ‘believed’ in alternative realities, where every choice you make ripples into an infinite number of possibilities and each reality describes a possibility. Far fetched?…yes. But the beauty of the human mind is that we have the cognitive ability to partially predict what might happen based upon past and present events - so we can play out these scenarios within our own reality.

Today we’re exploring two stories, same players, same events leading up to the incident, and extremely different outcomes. In the first story, a team sets out on a new software project, call it project X, for a new client. They perform time estimates, get approval from all interested parties, do the design and start the implementation. Bam! A major roadblock hits the team. The manager asks the team to buckle down, absorb the roadblock. Due to the loyalty of the team, they oblige, put in significant overtime and solve what needs to be solved and continue on their merry way. The roadblock pushes there timelines down a month but being great dev. they push forward ‘hoping’ that everything will be OK. They deliver the software to the client a month late, boggled with failures. Ultimately they’re unhappy, unsatisfied with the work and it takes an additional 3 months to stabilize. The second reality, the manager identifies that there is a major roadblock, informs the client and together they formulate a plan on working it out. The team does as little overtime as possible, they get there best guys on the roadblock, they reduce scope by a few features and they deliver 2 months late. The client ultimately happy with the quality of the software and believes that it was a success aside from the late delivery. So what went wrong in the first reality? It’s really about setting expectation in everything that you do. Say you’ll finish a task in a week and it takes you a week and two day. Take the same scenario but you say it will take you a week and a half. You’ve just turned yourself from being the wiener to being the winner. And it’s the same thing in the two stories. Get your client involved, let them invest in the cause so there’s buy-in from both side of the coin. One of the great things my previous employer preached was that good news travels fast, bad news should travel faster.