By Joe Procopio
Special to TechJournal South

There are some things in this life you can be sure about. Death. Taxes. Salespeople who will promise technical miracles that can be designed, coded, tested, and delivered with a nice zippy manual written in saddle stitch with a four-color cover and a preface by that kid who was in Galaxy Quest and is doing all those Mac commercials now. Oh, and damn his flaky Treo, but the sync function barfed and ate the email he sent saying it was due yesterday. But don’t worry, the requirements are fully documented on the back of a Ruth’s Chris receipt which is attached to his expense report just three floors down in accounting.

He’ll even run down there and get it for you. As soon as it gets approved and he gets his check.

There’s not much you can do about death. Sure, you can jog and eat tofu and wear a helmet, but the track record speaks for itself. Taxes, my secret Swiss back account notwithstanding, are pretty much mandatory these days.

And while it isn’t very hard to find yourself caught between an irresistible force (extremely complex technology build that will touch millions of customers and handle sensitive data…) and an immovable object (…that must be delivered tomorrow), this is the one element where you have some chance at contingency – a backup plan, an escape route, disaster recovery.

Plan Freakin’ B.

So how come no one ever does this? At least it seems that way. Raise your hand if the best backup plan ever afforded to you was one of the following:

1) Work nights and weekends.
2) Cut every single corner imaginable.
3) Make something up and punt.

Now, put your hands down. People will talk.

The ramifications of all of these pseudo-plans are ugly:

1) Alienate and burn out your workforce.
2) Deliver a hot steaming pile of garbage.
3) Implement fuzzy ethics.

By the way, while that last option is wrong – capital “W” wrong – it is a morbidly fascinating process to watch. I’ve seen some of the best of these “negotiation” artists convince the client, ever so subtly, that it’s actually their own fault that the product they speced out six months ago, with all their documentation and signatures in place, got lost in the black hole between kickoff and go live.

“If you had only called us every single Monday morning with unreasonable requests and hysterical demands like you were supposed to, we would have remembered to leave you several voicemail messages at odd hours of the middle of the night telling you it’s no big deal but we want to run a couple ideas by you. That alone would have given you enough wind to be suspicious of the fact that we’d put you on the back burner.”

Constructing and implementing a good Plan B is not rocket science unless, of course, you’re actually building rockets (sorry, I love that joke). It all starts, like just about every decision made in the technical world, with the project management triangle.

Features. Cost. Time.

Someone has to lose.

Plan B: Make 0.9 your 1.0.

Let’s start with feature set, because this has been drilled into my head since my first day in the technical world. Whether you’re familiar with Rapid Development, RUP, Object Oriented Design, virtually any type of methodology or formal programming process, you know that one of the smartest things you can do at the beginning of the design cycle is build a system in components. Those components, standing independently, should allow you to adjust the scope of your feature set to accommodate any surprises.

Can the DeLorean still drive on the highway without the flux capacitor and the plutonium? Yes. It can. Otherwise the movie ends with Michael J. Fox getting shot by a hick in a barn and there’s no sequel.

Plan B: Get to know the hired guns.

The other two sides reveal solutions that are less technical in nature. Cost, most commonly mapped as developer FTEs, has the most downside attached to it. There’s the overhead, the learning curve, the availability – all of these factors are what usually lead to the nights and weekends thing. It’s not cheaper to crush your own people, but it is far less hassle and more fun to watch.

But no one says you can’t create a virtual resource pipeline. Look, if you’ve ever met a technical recruiter or a consultant, chances are you have their card and they’ve called you a number of times just to say hello. Ignore your initial impulse and instead be the friend they’re looking for (seriously, 90% of the time they just want someone to share a cold lemonade with on a hot day). No one said it had to be anything more than cordial. The better ones will shower you with stuff too, like coffee mugs and squishy balls.

And if you ever reach the point where you need three Java people for three weeks in two days, they’ll become your BEST friend. Get all of the junk out of the way, like lead time, rate, skill set, obligations, during the salad days of the project when you’re in a much better position to negotiate. Then, when it all goes to hell, all you have to do is pull the trigger.

Plan B: Ask for that second date!

Time is the hardest side to recover, as it is, in fact, impossible to recover. This is why it’s the most critical factor to hit early and the most controversial of my Plan Bs.

The key is delivery dates. Plural.

When properly explained and cautiously executed, the concept of multiple delivery dates could possibly, and only possibly, get you out of hot water without burning resources or dropping features.

It works like this: When working out the project plan and/or contract, discuss the fact that most technical projects fail to meet the required date below the agreed upon cost with the required features.

Oh, make sure you do this without scaring the customer and losing the gig.

But the worst thing about delay, from the stakeholder’s perspective, is the fact that they usually don’t hear about it until very late in the game. Furthermore, there are usually several other external touchpoints aligned with that delivery date, like marketing for instance.

A backup delivery date won’t make everything right, but it will at least cushion the blow. Be prepared to offer concessions, perhaps a round of chocolate sundaes, if you have to resort to the second date, and remind them every step of the way that it isn’t a confidence issue, it’s a common sense issue.

And by all means, keep that in mind yourself, that difference between confidence and common sense. There’s no greater mistake in technology than thinking that you’ve got such a small number of features, the best people for the job, and plenty of time to do it in that nothing could POSSIBLY go wrong – so there’s no need for a contingency plan after all.

Although, if you can convince me of that, you’ve got a stunner of a future in sales.

–
Joe Procopio is the founder of Intrepid Media, a consulting firm (intrepidmedia.net) and publishing company (intrepidmedia.com). This column, along with several prior installments and ridiculously snarky new material, will be included in Gleaning The Cube, his forthcoming book. Joe can be reached at joe@intrepidmedia.net. He apologizes to all salespeople everywhere and would like to take them up on that lemonade.

 

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