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many delays that are introduced due to poor planning or scope creep are not recognized
until late in the project, during the testing activities. The testers may have done their jobs
and met all of their estimates, but, since they are in charge of the active task at the time
that the project delay is discovered, they are held accountable for problems that they had
no authority to prevent. It is your job to prevent this from happening by holding the peo-
ple responsible for the delay accountable. You must share in the consequences because
you failed to recognize the problem until too late. And you must take steps to prevent it in
future projects, by implementing additional tools and techniques.

Defend Your Project Against Challenges to Your Authority
If resources are pulled off of your project, your authority is being challenged. You only
have authority to do a task if you can command the resources necessary to complete it,
and, when people are pulled off of your project, those resources are no longer available to
you. However, the accountability is still in place. If you want to avoid being held account-
able for the project’s failure, you must recognize the challenge to your authority and
defend your project against it. This is difficult, and often requires patience and negotiation.
For example, it is very common for programmers to be interrupted “for just an hour or
two.” If a senior manager or executive needs help with something small—say, he’s having
trouble using a program that he knows the programmer wrote a few months ago—he will
often approach the programmer directly, without your knowledge. This puts the program-
mer in a difficult position, because she does not feel like she can tell this senior person that
she is too busy to help. She will want to be helpful, and may simply take on the extra
work without mentioning it to you.

If something like this happens, it is your job to address the situation. Though it seems
innocuous, this is an indirect (though probably unintended) challenge to your authority,
because a resource has been pulled off of your project. It is also a challenge to the pro-
grammer’s authority, because she no longer has enough time to do her task. This is a diffi-
cult situation to fix. You might approach the senior manager directly and explain that this
will cause a delay in the project, and that both you and your programmer will be held
accountable for her delay. If the senior manager balks, you might ask him to share the
accountability by writing an email to the project’s stakeholders explaining why the project

will be delayed, so that you won’t get blamed.
You may have to be creative in how you solve this problem, because this can be a politi-
cally charged situation. Approach it with a cool head. Do not accuse people of trying to
interfere with your project. Remember that the person you are talking to is just trying to
do his job, and he probably did not realize that he was putting your project at risk. Try to
talk about how this affects you and your project team, and be very specific about the con-
sequences. Give examples of how a delay in the programmer’s task will ripple down the
project and cause additional delays. Most importantly, make sure that you have your facts
straight before you meet with the other manager, and make sure that your own manager
knows everything you are about to say, and approves.

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