3 June: ??? Procrustes

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A CTO brought me an all-too-familiar conundrum last week–and one that’s hardly unique to tech teams. His company had just closed a sale to a gigantic customer with seemingly endless demands for changes and customisations–but the cyclic nature of their particular market means the product must be ready for use by a specific, immovable date, the equivalent of Christmas for toy shops or Valentine’s Day for florists. “I can already see that even if we work flat out just for them,” the CTO moaned, “our team will struggle to meet even a fraction of this customer’s requirements by the drop-dead day. And we still have all our existing clients to satisfy! Are we doomed by our success?” Luckily, I knew just the chap to help: my old friend Procrustes.

Procrustes was a Greek demigod, bandit, and all-around nasty piece of work. He’d trick victims into staying the night with him, then measure them against the cot they slept in: those who were too short, he stretched to the full length of the bed, while those who were too tall had their legs amputated to fit.?

Gruesome though the myth is, it gives us the very useful adjective “procrustean”, meaning “forcing strict adherence to a predetermined standard”–and it’s a procrustean solution that I recommended to the distraught CTO. I told him to focus all his energies on solving the customer’s real business problems in priority order, ruthlessly carving away everything that wasn’t actually needed for go-live despite their protestations.

He agreed this was the only possible way forward, that his team could get all the truly necessary work done in time, and that the hard choices needed to be made sooner rather than later. Of course, the real puzzle is how to have the inevitable productive conflict without losing the client in the process! That’s where you need a skilled account manager who navigates the corporate bureaucracy effortlessly, puts a word in the right ear at the right time, and knows how and when to disappoint people helpfully. I say, with only a hint of tongue-in-cheek, that these “enterprise whisperers” carry a special pocket watch that they swing in front of customers, saying softly, “You don’t need that feature…you don’t need that feature….” Though their methods may look like magic to the rest of us, they really boil down to rechristening “requirements” as “requests” and giving users what they need, not what they want.

How are you doing at distinguishing the essential from the aspirational in your project delivery? Comment to let me know!

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