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If your manager does not back you up in defending your authority, your hands are tied.
You will either have to renegotiate the schedule or accept the consequences. This is hard
for many people to deal with. The best way to prepare is to make sure that you have
plenty of documentation, so that when you are called upon to explain the delay, you can
show what caused it and, if necessary, that your manager knew about it and did not let
you fix the situation.

Do Everything Out in the Open

It is a very frustrating situation for a project manager when he makes a decision or takes
an action, and then finds that a colleague or senior manager disagrees with him for seem-
ingly no reason at all. Many times, these disagreements arise from a lack of communica-
tion. If everyone in your organization has constant access to everything that you and your
team produce, the mystery behind why you make your decisions goes away. People may
still disagree with you, but at least they will be disagreeing with your ideas and not simply
because they felt like they were kept out of the loop.

It’s not possible to tell everyone everything all of the time. But if it is known to the organi-
zation that a project manager is sharing his project information, and all of his colleagues
know where they can find that information, they are much less likely to feel like informa-
tion is being hidden from them.
Whether you are interacting with your team or with your organization’s management, it
is important that everything that you do is transparent. This means that when you create a
document, hold a meeting of interest to others, or make an important project decision,
you should share all of the information produced and used with everyone involved.

Publish Your Work Products
All work products should be kept in a public repository. This could be a shared folder or
directory, a version control system, a Wiki or other sort of web interface, a knowledge
base, or some other system for information storage. This ensures transparency for both
team members and the organization’s management.
When each person on the team knows that the work she is doing can be read and used by

all other team members, she will feel much more accountable for her work than if she
were doing the same thing in private. In general, people tend to create more readable doc-
uments, build more maintainable designs, and write more readable code if they know it
will be shared with others.
Managers also benefit from transparency of work products. For example, if a product ships
and a client encounters a defect, a client support manager can consult the test plan for the
part of the product in which the defect was found. He might want to see the defects
reported in the defect tracking system, or check the specification for the feature to verify
that it is indeed a defect and not a misunderstood feature. Publishing the work products
allows everyone in the organization to use them as reference materials.

236 CHAPTER TEN