Hurricane Irma impacted your project? Well…. Mountain Bandits Stole our Router!

When is an excuse really an excuse? Every project I’ve ever worked on has faced some adversity:

·        The contracts took longer to work out, and everything had to be put on hold

·        The vendor kept promising everything and delivering little

·        The main architect left right in the middle of the project

And so on. But are these valid excuses? I’d suggest not since at least one issue has probably been seen by all of us; maybe all 3. So, if we’ve all seen them, then they should have been expected and entered into the Risk Register, the probability versus possibility assessed, and mitigation crafted accordingly.

If these are not true excuses, what excuses should be accepted? Is a work impact caused by Hurricane Irma a valid excuse? Sitting in the NE, away from any coast, the answer would probably be “Yes”. We have a testing team in Tampa and our testing was affected. Everyone in the NE was sympathetic and accepted that the impact was beyond anyone’s control. But if you are based in Florida, then the answer might be “No”. After all, Florida gets hit by hurricanes pretty frequently; Hurricane Maria is set to strike in the next few days. A Floridian might say that there should have been a contingency plan developed if you are going to base a team in the state, and add, “Excuse not accepted”.

In another company, we were setting up DNS network access points in different parts of the world. We had Cisco equipment on a truck, driving to a more remote area of India – The truck (and the network equipment) was hijacked by bandits. Surely a good excuse? Maybe not if you are trucking hi-tech equipment in India: That PM might say, “Excuse not accepted”.

One definition would be when the issue has not been see by anyone. I’d never encountered bandits stealing Cisco kit - I was thinking the excuse was a pretty good one, so the point is debatable. But the typical excuses heard are pretty widespread – only an inexperienced PM would decide, “System performance issues killed the customer experience, and subsequently we lost market share”, is a valid excuse. Most of the projects I’ve been on have potential performance issues, and we plan accordingly. If there is a data breach at a company and the share price plummets, blaming the hackers is not going to accepted any more – it’s been seen too often.

I often hear golfers talk about, “The score that might have been”. They explain that if they hadn’t lost a ball, unexpectedly found water by an errant gust of wind, and then lost shots to bumpy greens and lip-outs, they would have shot the score of a lifetime. Unless the excuse is not a typical golf condition, then there are not excuses, just facts of the round.

Excuses are just Risk and Issues - If you manage your Risk Register and Issue Log, you manage success - something a good PM knows all about. So before you offer your next excuse why you are delivering late, ask if anyone could have predicted the situation. If the answer is “Yes”, you had better come up with a better excuse– I’m sure it will be a doozy.