"Hey Lady, Your Baby Is Ugly!"

Ok, we have all been there. Your good friends Bob and Sue have their first baby. You and your spouse, being good friends, go to the hospital to visit the proud new parents and their bundle of joy. You walk into the room and see mom has just finished feeding the baby and is now burping him. While she pats his little back you engage in small talk.

Then the time comes; the burping is done and mom asks if you like to "see" the little bundle of joy. "Sure," you say. She hands over the baby and you stare....in disbelief. You are now looking at the ugliest baby you have ever seen.

You are faced with two choices: one, you can lie and tell the proud new parents how beautiful their baby is, or two you can tell the truth and let them know their baby doesn't hold a candle to a gorilla's off-spring.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you will do the right thing and lie! You will gulp, and say something like, "oh, how beautiful!" Or, if you are really inventive you might say something like, "oh, what a precious, special baby!"

The one thing you never, never, never do is call someone's baby ugly.

Well, I and my fellow developers did just that to another group of developers one a day a few weeks back after they demonstrated their application to us. They acted like proud parents and we compared their little Jr. to the off-spring of Frankenstein. We let them know their application looked like a Windows version of an IDMS mainframe application; we called it old-school and claimed it was not user-friendly. The truth of it is--we were right. It is an awful application; it is not user-friendly and many potential users of the application have let us know that.

However, just as you never, never, never call someone's baby ugly, you don't do the same thing to someone else's application. We offended people we need to work with and since then the relationship has been strained to say the least. Both development teams are part of a larger project team that is building a multi-site, integrated system which will handle finance, project management, procurement, and inventory. The development team we offended is the lead technical team and the whole system is based on their application.

We do not like their application and we think using it as the base of the much larger system is a bad idea. However, since we have no long-term relationship with this other development group we have no influence or credibility with them. As a result, our feedback about their application was not well received and it "ruffled their feathers" so to speak.

You can't criticize other people with whom you have no trust relationship and expect them to take it well. Teams are held together only by the glue of trust. The problem is trust is not an easy thing to repair once broken. We violated that trust before we even gave it an opportunity to build and we may never fully be able to repair it since we broke it so early on.