Kissing the Project Manager

Ovid on 2003-04-09T17:07:19

As noted in yesterday's entry, I am getting resistance from the owner about spending time up front designing and estimating my work before diving in. Today, I sat down with the project manager and was blunt. The scope of work is so extensive and complicated that my design and estimate is taking longer than usual. My fear was that the owner was going to order me to stop designing and start coding. When I heard my project manager's response, I could have kissed him.

You have to do the design and estimate. Period. But don't call it a "design" or an "estimate". When ***** asks what you are doing, tell him about the current part that you are "working on" and start going into detail.

Problem solved :)

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Re: Kissing the Project Manager

dws on 2003-04-09T17:51:56

Another approach, depending on how technical the Owner is, is to reframe things in terms they'll get right away. Something like, "I'm doing detailed planning. This is a complicated project, and if we start construction on it without having worked through some of the details, we risk having to tear down walls to put in plumbing, and then tear them down again to put in wiring. That'd be wasting a lot of our time and your money, and we don't want to do that. Now what was your question?"

Re: Kissing the Project Manager

chromatic on 2003-04-10T17:16:08

Bah, it's just software! If you couldn't change it, we'd have to call it hardware.