Learning the hard way . . . from your mistakes.

John Maxwell authored a book a few years ago entitled "Failing Forward". The basic premise of the book was that we often learn and grow more from our mistakes than our successes. If that is the case, then I hope I grow alot from my most recent mistake (see previous blog post "Breakin' the Law . . . of Influence".

Here's the background of the previous blog post.

The whole project in which I am currently engaged is rife with corporate political intrigue. One and a half to two years ago the department I work for--one of the information technology departments--proposed a new WAN system to connect all our various sites' financial, procurement, requisition, and inventory systems via an intranet and the internet. The system would have been very costly to design and implement and equally as costly to maintain. The senior executive of my department pushed this idea whole-heartedly, but fortunately the CEO did not go for the idea. However, as a result the senior executive of my department fell out of favor with the CEO and other senior executives. In the vacuum that ensued (previously my senior executive was held in very high regard) the senior executive of the third department discussed in the previous post stepped in with a "less expensive solution"--a custom-built system his department had developed under the radar. He told the CEO with a few "tweaks" his system could do everything the one my department was proposing but in half the time, at half the cost, and with no additional staff! In July 2007 he said he could deliver the system by December 2008--eighteen months!

Unfortunately, the senior executive of the third department had no idea what he was talking about. His department's business needs (his department basically acts as a procurement arm for our biggest customer) are vastly different than mine or the second department (we are basically research and development organizations) and his department's custom-built solution is not scalable to an enterprise wide system.

Long story short, in December 2007 my team was added (five people) as well as five people from the second department as the project leadership from the third department began to realize the enormity of the task. So, now there are 15 developers on a project was only supposed to need 5. And, not a single line of code has been written yet. We are still trying to figure out how to merge all the requirements of the three departments together when their business needs are very different.

The project is now going way over budget and time and will ultimately deliver a system that is not nearly as robust as the current system. The users are looking at losing current functionality so that the system can be completed in a relatively shorter period of time. Many core functionalities are being pushed off to "phase 2"--whenever that will happen.

Thus the reason for my trying to influence the development teams to consider the needs of the users.

I know, another long post, but I hope it helps to give some background. I do not justify my actions--I was wrong because I violated the laws of leadership; it will now take me a long time to restore the influence I did have and I may never be able to build a good working relationship with the project leadership. Lesson learned for me.