Don't Succumb to PM Long Division Syndrome

Some time back, I took over a high-risk program from a client project manager. The program had a contractually-fixed due date with a material business impact if the date wasn’t met. There was a minimum-bar scope to which we had to adhere: no subtracting scope or adding to scope.

Budget was not an issue; we (fortunately) didn’t have to worry about how much the program cost. The marching orders were clear: hit the date, manage the scope, and don’t worry about money.

The problem was that there was too much scope to hit the date using conventional waterfall or agile methodologies. We had four months to deliver what in reality was eight schedule months of work. Going back and saying, “It can’t be done” wasn’t an option because of the contractual requirement. So we got creative.

We divided the work into four sprints consisting of one or more baseline meetings, development, integration testing, user acceptance testing, and a go-live meeting with our sponsors at the end of each of the four months.
We not only overlapped the sprints, we also overlapped steps within the sprints. In any given sprint, we had concurrent development and integration testing activities with users participating in integration testing to identify potential user acceptance issues earlier (something I refer to as “canary in the mine” testing).

It was very messy, and not something I would have designed at the outset of a program. But I didn’t have the luxury of designing a “right way to do it” approach. I am confident that if a project auditor did a post-mortem on the approach, I’d get called out as having created and managed a hot mess.

And it was a hot mess—but we got the work done to the minimum-bar scope and the contractually fixed date. Our leadership didn’t give a fig about whether or not we did something the “right” way. We got the job done, hot mess and all.

My purpose for this opening story is not to engage in a waterfall/agile debate. The truth is that we were very hybrid in how we worked. My focus is to talk about something PMs need to avoid in this AI age: long division syndrome. Let me explain.

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