Imagine this scenario: You’re a project or program manager. You suspect things are not going swimmingly well. But no one has told you any bad news. Not yet. What do you do?
As a facilitative leader, such as a project, program, or agile project manager (Scrum Master), it’s your job to seek out that bad news. Then assess what you discover to replan or manage the risks.
Worse, what if you’re “just” a person on a project, and you know things are going badly. No one can demo a thing. And while you can check in your code or tests, other people seem to have trouble. Since you’re okay, should you tell anyone else about this bad news?
Yes. You should. You might not be able to fix these problems alone (and I recommend collaboration for all things product development), but bring that bad news to someone who can help address the problems. That’s where facilitative leadership can shine.
Because bad news never ages well. It gets worse before it can get better.
Why Bad News Gets Worse
Bad news gets worse because:
- If the bad news is invisible, then no one can know or address the problems that lead to this bad news.
- If no one addresses those problems, the problems will multiply.
- Once the problems multiply, those problems seem to reproduce at an alarming rate. (They tend to cascade.) Too soon, there are so many problems and they’re all interconnected. Now, you have a Big Ball of Mud and no way out of it.
(While Foote and Yoder described this as a software architecture problem, projects and programs also have architectures. Software architectures and project architectures have precisely the same problems. That’s because, in each case, the architecture is a function of culture.)
The bad news keeps increasing, getting worse and worse. Now, some of the root causes are old. Can you even fix them?
How to Stop Bad News Aging
I know of these ways to stop bad news aging:
- Ask for bad news any time you have any kind of project meeting. (See all these books for options: Manage It!, Agile and Lean Program Management, or Create Your Successful Agile Project.)
- Ask to see product demos and any other visual form of progress. Never use burndown charts. I don’t even like burnup charts.
- Make all the stories one day or one-team-day in duration. Demo after every story.
Bad news never gets better on its own. Search for it. Fix the problems. And create a culture that encourages people to tell anyone bad news.