Your Third Deliverable: Respect

Emily, a Software Development Manager, is working on a prospective customer's pilot project. They are evaluating her company's technology to see how well it would integrate with their software. Emily has established a great relationship with the pilot project team. With the project deadline looming, the team wants to take some shortcuts, leaving them with an incomplete integration. Emily worries that this integration could fail in production. She has also noticed technical problems that will take additional time to fix. Emily wants to confront the pilot team with these issues while maintaining the great relationship she has developed with them.

Emily meets with Katherine, the Account Manager for the prospective customer. She gives Katherine an overview of the issues.

Emily says, "I'm concerned how the team will react when faced with all of these issues. If they deal with the issues, they will miss their deadline. If they don't deal with them, we won't know if our technology works together in all cases."

Katherine thought about it. She asks, "Would you rather not disclose the issues and hope for the best?"

"No," Emily says, "But I can see the managers on the team getting very upset with missing the deadline. I'm afraid that they will throw us off the project."

"What would you do if someone on your development team told you technical problems would delay a release? What if you could make up the time by taking shortcuts?" Katherine asks.

"We wouldn't take shortcuts. I would rather tell management that the release will be late," Emily replies "I would look into the details of the technical problems to see if we could get back on schedule any other way."

Katherine asks, "Would you fire the developer who told you about the technical problems?"

"Of course not! I encourage everyone on my team to bring up major problems as soon as they see them. I get more upset if they withhold bad news."

Katherine says, "I bet the managers on the pilot team think the same way. Go ahead and tell them everything. I'll be glad to support you at the meeting."

Emily knew what she had to do and took Katherine's offer for support.

Emily feels nervous going into the meeting. She knows that she has to disclose the problems, smashing the team's illusion that everything is going OK. If the managers get angry with her, she'll ask Katherine to intervene.

Emily presents the challenges she and the team must overcome to deliver a fully functional prototype. She suggests an approach to take on each challenge, including a time estimate for each one. Resolving all the challenges adds a few weeks to the schedule, keeping the team from delivering the fully functional prototype by the deadline.

A team manager tells Emily they have to deliver the project by the deadline. Emily informs the manager they can have a working prototype by the deadline, but it will not deal with exception cases that come up in production. The manager insists that they need to have a fully functional prototype by the deadline. He tells Emily to figure out how to deliver it.

Emily glances at Katherine, who gives Emily a hint of a smile and a nod. Emily addresses the team, saying she looked at every possible way to deliver a fully functional prototype by the deadline. She could not find a way without taking short cuts and recommends they get a deadline extension to deliver a complete working prototype.

The manager becomes angry, accusing Emily of missing something. Katherine starts to speak, but a senior manager on the team interrupts her. He asks his fellow manager how he knows Emily missed something. The manager says he "just knows." The senior manager does not accept that, pointing out that Emily showed her research and did not find a way to deliver the full prototype by the deadline. He says he will request a deadline extension.

The senior manager takes Emily and Katherine aside after the meeting. He tells Emily that she took a lot of courage to come in and break the bad news about the project delays. He says all but one of the managers on the team respect her for that. He promises to have a discussion about respect with the manager who pressured Emily in the meeting.

Emily earned the respect of the team managers by revealing the truth about the project and offering solutions to their challenges. She researched all the delivery scenarios and recommended extending the project deadline, an unpopular choice. The senior manager recognized this and requested an extension. She earned Katherine's respect by maintaining her position when the manager tried to push her back into the "everything's OK" illusion.

Respect stakeholders' time, energy and attention spent on discovery.

Please share any story where you earned the respect of stakeholders, or what they did to gain more respect from you.