Angry about Slippage
A “Command & Control” IT Manager
This is an angry text. I’m writing this listening to loud and angry music.
Men are shouting, swearing and generally having a bad time. One of the systems I look after has been subject to Slippage!
It happened a few years ago; I received an escalation email from a very senior stakeholder. The email itself wasn’t too angry, but you could feel the anger coming out your monitor if you were to read it. The sender’s inner anger had clearly been fuelled by their own stakeholder’s anger and it flowed downstream to me.
It was clear that I was meant to take this anger and pass it down to my delivery manager. They could then pass their anger down to the team, the people doing the work. Yes, shout at them a bit and make them work harder. Threaten them. Whatever you need to do to get the job done. It was a very “command and control” organisation.
In the “angry” email I received came some of the best lines I’ve ever seen in an email. I really wish I’d saved it. The ones that stick out in my head are:
Please fill in the below and send this email back to me ASAP.
I_____________ agree that NO further slippage in the project will occur.
Oh yes, this person was super angry.
Like many other companies, the process went a bit like this:
- Get teams to estimate work based on a “more or less” specification
- Take those estimates and double them because even really clever people underestimate things
- Produce plans from those estimates
- Ensure that all your dependencies are aligned
- Incorporate your dependencies into your plan
- Forget about change, the date is your God now
- Split the work up into chunks and Sprint(s) through it (SCRUM)
- Be told that the date is next month, not next quarter due to “reasons”. God can do as he pleases
- Get annoyed about Slippage and send passive aggressive emails
Even with a vastly reduced timeline, it was still possible to get something out of the door. The quality would be the first thing to suffer as the time for testing and UAT is usually the first thing to get dropped in these circumstances. Also, code quality suffers. Developers in a hurry omit unit tests, kick the SOLID principles out the way. Technical debt rises quickly here.
Even with all these issues, it’s still possible to deliver software as the team is something that can be controlled. When working with some 3rd parties, that element of control can go away.
Our team was fully remote and provided by a 3rd party, but they were Agile and integrated with our company in a very healthy way. We had daily meetings with the team responsible and they also attended a lot of our ad-hoc meetings as well. No issues there at all. They were the main team on the project. The ones that were expected to take the beating.
There were other 3rd parties that were completely siloed away. They were given their part of the specification and went away and built it all behind closed doors. Communication was limited, collaboration was non-existent. When their components weren’t ready, it influenced the outcome of the entire project.
Just one poorly managed dependency can cause slippage and derail an entire project if it’s on the critical path. In this case, the dependency was being managed, but by the angry email sender!
I never filled in the “I wish to hang myself with your weird corporate noose” form, which probably made my stakeholder even more angry. I sent back an email showing our sprint burndowns, talked about projections and even estimates.
Basically, the message was. We got this, we know how to deliver software. You’re in a safe pair of hands. If you can show that you are in control and that you’re doing the best things possible to bring your project in on time then you should be good. It won’t be bullet proof against angry emails, but constant communication is key.
Problems can only be fixed when they’ve been identified. Raise issues, talk often.
I never received a response to my email, in fact it was never spoken about again.
Maybe they put on some angry music like I’ve got on now. I’d recommend it, it can be very cathartic.