False Start!

“they are pissed!”

This message came out of the blue - this was a great long term customer of ours and we had kicked off our new service offering with them. The offering was meant to reduce a lot of the overhead in our engagements by removing the engagement oversight and governance off the team, leaving direct access to the consultants themselves. Our customers have been responding well to this offering, so I was curious to see what was going on. I quickly checked the project dashboards... and nothing. No movement of any sort since we started the engagement two months ago.

I went into a mild panic.

How could this have happened? The engineer was about to be transferred over to my team full time, and I had heard that they were one of the best in the company. I refused to believe they would leave a customer hanging. Normally when we get a compliant it's more of a misunderstanding or something needs quick clarification. Here was a different story - we actually didn’t do anything with their project - yikes!

My inbox pinged - the customer is now asking for a refund of services and for a new engineer to be assigned to the project.

"shit."

THE CALL

The next day’s call with the customer was awkward.?I had confirmed previously that there was legitimately no progress made on the project, and the customer's concerns were valid. I also wasn’t able to meet with my engineer before the meeting - which is not good. I prefer to speak to my team before we sit down with our customers, just so we have all of the available information and there are no surprises.

We started by offering space for the customer to speak openly, and we listened. We explained the service offering details, and apologized for not meeting their expectations. This was the hard part - not making excuses, not trying to explain away their concerns, but just listening and apologizing. My engineer tried to take all the blame directly themselves, stating that it was their responsibility to complete the work and that they hadn’t effectively communicated with the rest of us. While there may have been some truth to this, it did not excuse the rest of us for not catching it. We are a team, and we don’t let each other take the blame for something that is a shared responsibility.?We ended the call on a positive note by making a plan, effectively doubling their service offering until we got back on track.

DEBRIEF

So how did this happen? As it turns out, I DID have one of the best engineers in the company transferring to my team - one of the very best. They had been stepping up and taking ownership of a few key projects, both with internal initiatives and multiple customer facing projects. They were taking on even more responsibility as one of our emerging product leads. Let’s also add in some pre-sales support, senior executive pet projects, and finally volunteered to speak at the next 4 upcoming conferences this year! I kept digging and before I knew it there was enough work on their plate to fill three or four different roles - I was stunned.

SHORT TERM FIX -

We went immediately into triage. Firstly, the customer who had been receiving no service was placed on top, shorty followed by the remaining customer's work. This alone filled our engineer's allocation up to 100%. We then placed the emerging product work, the senior executive requests, and the pre-sales support on the chopping block. I brought in a couple other of my other engineers to help share the load and messaged all of the senior executives to find out solutions for their initiatives. It caused a bit of shuffling, but we could see the light at the end of the tunnel by the end of the session. We then committed to weekly review sessions where we can discuss any new requests that come in. We put a jira board in place to start tracking the additional backlog items that come in until we can get back to a reasonable workload.

TAKEAWAYS

It's an old story. Someone leaves or gets fired, the rest of the team picks up the slack. A couple key executives ask you to do something, and of course you say yes - because they are your boss's boss's boss. Add a few requests here, a customer project there, and you're at your brim. If anything happens that disrupts the equilibrium, then it all becomes overwhelming very quickly.

for leadership

There are a few items to take away from this scenario:

• Conflict Resolution - Our customer was angry and had every right to be. We couldn’t soften the blow of the messaging, all we could do was work to make things right.
• Communication - There was a communication gap within our team. When you learn about your mistakes from your customers it’s too late.
• Morale & Team Trust - I needed to see what was going on within my team member and validate the information I was being given by the customer and through our dashboards. Data doesn’t tell the whole story and I needed to see what was really going on.

approach

Trust in your people and assume positive intent. It is likely your people trying to do their best, with limited time and resources. Defend them as much as possible, and give assurances that you have their back. NEVER throw them under the bus. That may feel like an easy fix and solve the moment, but you will lose their trust, and that is difficult to gain back.

for individuals

Watch closely the work that is being assigned to you, and remind yourself of your current workload when new assignments come in. It’s easy to not consider the mountain of work behind you when a new request comes in. Try some of these helpful methods:

• ask: “when do you need this by?” Almost no request is immediate or an emergency. Get in the habit of asking about timelines and level of impact; this will help guide your decision on what is the highest priority vs lowest priority items in your backlog.
• time blocking - set specific times in your calendar that are dedicated to deep work, this can be a leading indicator that you started to take on too much work based on how quickly the week fills up
• request redirection - don’t commit to things verbally. Get a ticket or story created for tracking purposes. This will visually guide you in seeing how much work in on your plate.

If you are conflict avoidant, try saying something like: “Let me check my workload and get back to you by this date." You almost never have to commit to something in the room, even if it feels like you do.

YOUR TURN!

Have you ever been in a similar situation? If so, what helped you work through this with your team and customers? Do you have any additional tips or tricks would be good to consider? Let us know in the comments below! ??