by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n
Time and again I have seen people make a terrible mess, work hard to fix their mess, and be proclaimed a hero. I still don’t understand why anyone would reward such a person.<\/strong><\/p>\n In the mid-1980s I started managing projects. I looked about to see what my peers – other project managers – were doing. I kept hearing praises of some of my peers, so I looked closer to learn from their successes.<\/p>\n I got sick.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “So-and-so is dedicated to the project. Look at him, he cancelled a cruise that he and his wife were to take so that he would finish his project on time.”<\/p>\n I looked closer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So-and-so had,<\/p>\n So-and-so was a terrible estimator as the project required 2X hours, and the date Y would not move because so-and-so was a hero. To finish on date Y, so-and-so literally slept at work. He worked nights; he worked weekends, and he cancelled his cruise with his wife. I never heard if so-and-so’s wife divorced him.<\/p>\n Hmmm, so-and-so worked like a hero to save the day and put out the fire. The problem, as I saw it, was that so-and-so was the person who started the fire by terribly underestimating the work on his project. This all seemed obvious to me. Why would anyone hail so-and-so as a hero?<\/p>\n Well, senior managers didn’t see it the way I did. They rewarded so-and-so and everyone else who made the same terrible mistakes while estimating the work required on their projects.<\/p>\n Thirty years later, I see the same happening again. People make a terrible mess, work crazy hours or something, and clean up their mess. They are heroes.<\/p>\n Why do we proclaim heroes those people who make terrible messes or set their own houses on fire?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dwayne Phillips Time and again I have seen people make a terrible mess, work hard to fix their mess, and be proclaimed a hero. I still don’t understand why anyone would reward such a person. In the mid-1980s I started managing projects. I looked about to see what my peers – other project managers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,63,33,9,10],"tags":[139,183,155,132,133],"class_list":["post-654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-expectations","category-health","category-management","category-people","tag-culture","tag-expectations","tag-health","tag-management","tag-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=654"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":655,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654\/revisions\/655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n