Au urgent meeting was convened to discuss the ramifications of a further 2 week delay in the “go-live roll out” for a software project which was to impact 50,000 cable-TV users in Australia. Australian cable companies are presently fielding customer anger because customers have paid for, yet not received, this delayed service.
Invited to the meeting were Arthur from the Australia (the account manager), Arturo ( a developer) from Mexico, Erez (a developer) from Israel and Tim (master scheduler) from Germany. Arthur is based in Australia; all the others are US based company HQ.
Tim came into the conference room 5 minutes early and mentioned that he has yet to receive an agenda.
Erez called into the meeting because he had to take his kids to a school play and one could hear his wife castigating him in the background: “why don’t you go and live at work”? The quality of Erez’s connection was also unclear and he got cut off three times.
Arturo came into the meeting 20 minutes late, asked everyone how things are going. Then just as the meeting was coming to end, Arturo said, “I have a few important issues that are not on the agenda which impact the estimation of readiness for deployment”. Arturo then communicated really bad new of even a further delay of 6 weeks. Arturo suggested that Arthur “bargain for an extension”.
Account manager Arthur maintained his cool until Arturo suggested bargaining for an extension with Australian client. “Listen mate, you can bargain in Mexico, but not in Australia!” Arturo fought back; Arthur got furious and lost his cool. Erez added: “This is the first time I see you really care about the delay, Arthur; we can help you by working weekends!” Both Erez and Arturo had been really impressed by Arthur’s anger.
Tim mentioned that the plan would need to be adjusted to reflect reality. “We need to be transparent” stated Tim, who seemed irrelevant in the semi Levantine reality in this post modern team. Arturo and Erez just don’t get Tims’ hang up on transparency. Erez and Arturo view transparency as counterproductive to managing (not meeting) customer expectations.
