What you don’t know…
Working on projects with a lot of different people can be tricky! There are many personalities, nuances, and even politics to navigate. But the worst thing about managing projects is not knowing what you don’t know.
You can ask all the questions you want, but unless you’re asking the ‘right’ questions… you may still be missing the target.
This happened on one project I was involved in. Not asking a very specific question almost derailed the whole thing!
In my corporate life, we worked on a project to hire a third-party service provider to manage our check printing. Our internal software was at its end of life and would no longer be supported, so we needed to find another solution. We sat down with the current stakeholders and asked many questions about turnaround, processing, and interfaces.
But we didn’t think to ask about the specifics within the source system…which hit back hard!
We had it all set; we found a third-party partner and started application integration testing. While this was a large project, it was certainly moving along.
Until it didn’t.
You see, we were having a stakeholder meeting when we learned that there was an issue with the source system, in which all addresses had to be entered manually. This doesn’t seem like a huge deal, but there was a huge room for error when it came to typos. With multiple checks sometimes going to the same address, there was a good chance that at least one check would have a typo.
Here’s where the process went a little sideways: We also found out that a human person was reviewing every single check (we’re talking a hundred or more at a time) to double-check the addresses.
If she found an incorrect address, she’d manually pull it and complete an envelope.
Which is very thoughtful, right?!
But when it came to partnering with a third-party provider that prints thousands and thousands of checks each day, they certainly weren’t looking at checks and comparing addresses.
When our stakeholder discovered that the service provider wouldn’t provide this manual service, she refused to sign off on any further progress with the project.
We were stuck! Eventually, we figured out a system and could move forward with the project.
But what did I learn from this?
A better understanding of a source system (which was homegrown, by the way) and its capabilities and limitations would have led us to ask better questions.
Instead of understanding the data that would be transferred to the new provider and mapping only that, walking through the upstream flow would have given us a better idea of where the information comes from and allowed us to understand the manual process and the risk of error.
Finally, the human reviewing and pulling the checks had been included in the fact-finding interviews, but we didn’t really dig into the details of the process. Having asked more questions may have provided further clarity
Are you struggling to ask the right questions about your changes? Our Change Impact Guide can help spark your question-asking and avoid serious project delays. Download your free copy here.
