97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know

Chapter 81. The Fallacy of Status

Udi Dahan

AFTER A SUCCESSFUL FIRST PROJECT, I confidently embarked on my second. This was a larger project, it was more strategic to my employer, and I would manage a multidisciplinary team of people. I was sure that the skills that had served me the first time around wouldn't fail. Interestingly enough, it was my trust in my team's status reports that was my eventual undoing.

About two months into the project, my infrastructure team lead confessed, "It turns out some of the architectural assumptions we made were unfounded." However, he assured me that, "We'll be back on track by the end of the month." Despite his reassurances and the contingency buffers I had in place, I couldn't dismiss the sense that something was wrong.

At the end of the month, I followed up with the same team lead. He showed me how the refactoring work had been completed on schedule and how the developers were all set to hit their targets for the coming month. When I sat down with my integration team lead, she notified me that everything looked good from her vantage point, too. Modules were complying with their specifications, each had been sufficiently tested, and all the multiple layers of the architecture tested stable enough for the first integration.

After a slightly bumpy first integration (as many of them are) and a regular quality assurance cycle, I was astounded to discover ...