Of course, the whole problem is manufactured. A Spanish company might request that you install something in 2 weeks, without any decent notice period, just before Christmas. They just wouldn’t expect that anyone [worth their salt] would actually agree to such a [stupid] thing.

As manufactured scenarios go this one is a doozy. It might be standard practice in the U.S. to forget about something as important as Christmas when making a business decision but I never came across this whilst working in the U.K. or N.Z.

Tim is violating Rands rule #1 – “Don’t be a prick”.

Whilst the company might want that casino biz back it has managed to get by without it for the last year or so. The casino company chose to go elsewhere, so they now go to the back of the list, behind the customers that stayed with the company’s products and the new customers awaiting their first install.

I’m not saying they go all the way to the back of the queue but they can wait until the New Year has broken. After all, they have been getting by until now.

Kristen is a star because she is trying to honour the promises she made to people. Promises that were very reasonable at the time they were made. Promises those people consider to be promises their employer made to them.

Tim is a “prick”. I think its time he did a bit of install work himself if he thinks it can all be done in 2 weeks.

As for getting his old team leader back in to do the job, he can do that too. Doing so, will totally undermine Kristen in her role. This still leaves Tim as rule violator #1.

Nah, if anyone isn’t ready its Tim.

1. Most of big organizations (vendors) doesn’t really care about these kind of issues on top management level. Even if they did any analysis of this case it would probably end at “this customer is important for us (hey, everyone is) and Tim did what was necessary to keep good relation with them.” Any failure would be addressed to Kristen but there would be tons of excuses, Kristen being a newbie being most notable one.

2. Many clients, especially big ones, create this kind of situations on and on and don’t understand it can be really a big problem for themselves too. If it was so and Tim would reject to do what they wanted they would go further – to Key Account Manager and other people who know less about managing projects and people but understand business value of the customer. Finally someone would agree and the situation would look the same.

Now, I don’t say Tim is a good manager or that decision-makers shouldn’t try to find more reasonable solution. Far from that. What I say is there are loads of Tims and alikes and there’s nothing to be surprised or enraged about.

We just have to learn how to deal with these situations even when we aren’t allowed to choose the most reasonable path.

As for what the question should be, I imagine everybody involved in the project would be asking themselves what they should do. The people who helped promote Tim to his current position are an example. So are the people who helped promote *those* people. (It wouldn’t be the first time incompetence was promoted.) For the purposes of the case study, the author chose Tim as the subject.

As for it being an unrealistic scenario, well not enough info on my (stingy) part, so no argument.

Enterprise client, project was “critical” to the business, my 2nd day on the job and a “make it happen” mandate with zero support from management.

What I did was ask the team who would be implementing it. They all said “not likely, but we probably can…”

Needless to say the project failed miserably and I failed to say “no” from the start. That failed project was brought up by “Tim” and other management folks regularly about ‘how terrible of a job’ I was doing.

Needless to say I burned a bridge at this organization and simply quit without any prospects. In fact, within a month the implementation services team all quit except for 1 person.

Scary thing was this pattern repeated itself before I got there and during my short tenure. I was shell shocked but it was a HUGE learning experience.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by johannarothman: Problem Solving Requires the Right Question, http://ping.fm/nd0WP…