Project management isn’t always easy.

I once found myself discussing a project with a project manager. I’ll not go into too much detail, but essentially, it was a very technical project. The project was creating a service to process data much faster than they currently offered. In fact, its goal was to process it faster than anyone in their industry had ever done—way faster. 

The project had a deadline, and a litigious client was waiting at the finish line for their product. If they didn’t get it, they had some very good, very highly paid lawyers on speed dial.

But the project manager wasn’t worried.  He thought things were progressing well – spoiler, they weren’t – and was looking forward to taking the product to an external testing facility that had the server set up in place to truly test whether the product was capable of operating at the speeds we’d promised for a sustained period.

I pointed out that we had some delays already in the project and asked whether this impacted the testing date with the third party. He told me that wasn’t a problem because there wasn’t a confirmed testing date with the third party. They’d just book it when they were ready.

I asked what the third party, with its massive server farm, was doing while apparently waiting for us to turn up at their doorstep with a bunch of code. He said they worked with many large institutions, including many of the large banks we know about, and were in great demand for their services.

So I asked, how do you know they’ll have the capacity to fulfil our testing if we arrive unplanned? 

Silence. 

I asked if he knew for certain they had ANY capacity between now and our handover date. 

Silence. 

I asked if he was just hoping they’d be available and ready. 

Silence.

That project… didn’t go well.

So, here’s a test.  Multiple choice quiz time.  Was this a failure of:

• Risk management.
• Planning.
• Vendor management.
• Or other.

Let me know your opinion.

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