Tales from the Project Management Jungle(tm): The MIC Story

This story shows the result when there is a lack of integrity within the team process. One of the many people I have gotten to know over the years is a PM buddy of mine; called Harry H. Harry swears this is a true story.

Harry’s boss had technical (not business) responsibility for all of the design projects for a division of a major technology corporation. He called Harry in one day and said, “Go look at the Project X schedule and see what date they can really make. We are meeting with MIC (Most Important Customer) next week and I want to know what to tell the staff before the MIC meeting.”

Harry found the team the next day. They were already in a schedule review. Harry spent a couple of hours looking at their schedule, which showed month “so and so” as the finish date. He asked a bunch of questions and they all agreed month “so and so” was “aggressive but doable.” Harry then this reported back to his boss.

The next week Harry was in a review that the division manager and his staff held in preparation for the meeting with MIC. When the project area business manager went through his summary foils on Project X the schedule commitment date he noted was two months earlier than what the project team and Harry had agreed to the previous week. He made no mention of that fact to the staff.

They all had text pagers at the time, so Harry started texting: his boss, the project manager he had met with, the assistant project manager, everyone. “This is the wrong date, right? We cannot make it,” Harry texted. No one would reply, so Harry stood up and said to the division general manager, “This date is not what was agreed to and is too aggressive, we won’t make it. You at least need to know that.”

Harry’s boss then paged him, “Let the politicians handle this,” after which much discussion ensued. Finally, likely angry with all of them, the division general manager assigned the area business manager an action to figure out what the correct date was and the meeting was adjourned. Harry then lost track of that thread, was excluded from any further meetings, and was not involved with that project any further, in any capacity. All he had done was tell the truth, correct? Didn’t people need to know or was Harry simply naïve?

Harry was unable to tell me for a fact what date they told MIC the next week. Harry did find out that the project eventually was several months late to even the date they had agreed to in the team review, much less the more aggressive date. And he also learned that the corporation subsequently lost the business of that customer, a huge blow.

And both his boss and the area business manager involved left the corporation unhappily within a few months of that event. What price truth? Pretty high for all involved.

The point to me is obvious, but let me state it. Who were these guys fooling and why did they not tell the truth--at least among themselves--much less to the customer? Had there been real trust, true accountability and a transparent communicative culture within the staff would the same results have occurred?

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