It was a sunny Thursday afternoon when Molly read Ross’s email. “We made a mistake closing the Antenna Array Design/Develop/Protype task early. How can we get this reopened?”
Molly called Ross later in the day. “Hi Ross. How was Hawaii?”
“It was good! It was really nice to get away. But now I’m coming back down to Earth a bit, especially when I found out my team closed the antenna array task early.”
“You guys marked that task complete two weeks ago. If you were still working on the antenna array, why didn’t it get reopened last week?”
“I don’t know,” Ross replied. “They closed it while I was on vacation, and I only caught it today. But we still have to install the prototype and get the Engineering Board and the Federal Communications Commission to approve our design before we move to testing.”
Molly was baffled. “There’s two reviews baked into this task… and one of them is with a government regulator?”
“Yeah,” Ross said sheepishly. “And the Engineering Board didn’t know we had this coming up. They can’t meet with us until next month.”
“So, to sum up,” Molly said, “we’re reopening and extending a task which we took credit for finishing early. And that’s to get us through the easy wicket which hit us completely by surprise.”
“Did you miss me?” Ross quipped.
“Apparently,” Molly chuckled.
Questions to Consider
- Ross’s engineers surely know how much work they have left to do. Why might they have marked this task complete?
- How did Ross lose control of his team’s work? Was his vacation to blame?
- Managers routinely bemoan the danger of making a schedule too detailed because would be “unmanageable”. What made this single task unmanageable?
- Mistakes like this often result in organizations setting up a special calendar or other management artifact to make sure critical events are not missed. What project document is well suited for tracking such events?
