A True Story

This story I came across while preparing for my PMP exam and reading the book “Preparing for the Project Management Professional Certification Exam” by Michael Newell.

This story talks about a project manager who went to work for a company that produced computer software. This project manager was hired to complete a project that was to produce a significant amount of the company’s income for the year, and it had a strict deadline for 12 months.

As time went by, the project manager settled in, and after a couple of weeks the project manager’s boss asked her how many lines of code had been written for the project. She replied, “Well, none at the moment. We are describing the user’s requirements and doing some planning for the project, but no, we have no lines of code written.”

This seems to satisfy the manager for the time being, and the project manager continued her work. After about a month the project manager’s boss showed up again and asked the same question, “How many lines of code have you and your project team written?”

The project manager, recognizing the concern of her manager, said, “Well, none, but we are getting organized. We have defined the deliverables for the project, and we have made a work breakdown structure, and we have started our risk analysis, but no, we have no lines of code written.” Somewhat shaken, the manager left.

This went on for some time. The project manager did planning and organizing for the project execution to take place, and her manager grew more and more frantic with each passing day.

Then, after about eleven months, the project was completed. The customer and all the stakeholders were happy, the software was fully tested and it met all the requirements as specified. The customer accepted the system and paid the bill.

The project manager’s boss decided to throw a party for the entire project team. The project manager’s boss took her aside during the party and said, “I want to congratulate you on getting this project done with the time required, but it seems to me that if you had not been messing around doing that planning stuff and gotten busy writing code from the start, we would have been done about two months sooner.”

In conclusion, what is meant by this story is that upper management are the most resistant to change. Thousands of dollars are being spent by companies to train project managers but none are spent to train the managers above those project manager.