Rolling the Grenade

One client, Sharon, said that she could not afford to retain the firm to implement a new payroll system. She wanted to hire contract programmers because they would be cheaper. I cautioned that, although their hourly rate would be lower, they would not bring the project management expertise and experience to help her be successful. Fast-forward nine months. The payroll system implementation was late, and the interface to the accounting system did not work correctly. After this happened, she called for our help.

 

I asked, “Why did you not just call us in the first place?”

 

Sharon’s reply was, “We needed to burn our fingers on the stove first.”

 

Flustered, all I could blurt out was, “Why? For the love of God, why?”

 

At the end of the engagement, Sharon said that she and her staff really valued the professional relationships with my consultants and that “our team’s chemistry was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

 

Another rolling-the-grenade example was a client executive who did not want to move her staff to a shared workspace with my team. Her staff was located on the third floor, and my team was officed on the 11^th floor. This building literally had the slowest set of elevators on the planet. You had to schedule 20 minutes on your calendar for an elevator ride (one way). I pleaded with her to let us work together in one space to facilitate better communication. No, she did not want to ask her staff to move.

 

Her staff was testing a new payroll system, and my team provided technical support and fixes. The first week or two, her staff would email my team with perceived problems. It would usually take a day for them to send the issue and for my team to log the item for resolution. Then, a day or two later, a response would be sent back to her team. Sometimes, the problems were simply not knowing how to navigate the new system, and other times, fixes were needed. Well, by the third week, tensions were running high between both groups. Her staff was frustrated by how long it took to get a simple answer, and my staff was flummoxed because they knew that if they were co-located they could solve many perceived problems on the spot.

 

Her staff’s frustration finally exploded: “KABOOM!” Now, the client executive agreed to move her staff to the 11th floor so we could all sit together. The results were magical. When issues would arise, her staff could just lean over and ask someone nearby what they thought. Hundreds of nonissues were resolved through the normal course of daily interactions. And actual problems were logged because they did need to be fixed. The morale of both groups improved dramatically, and the project’s progress lurched forward.

 

She also had a beat-the-vendor policy directive from her executive leaders. My client was rewarded by her executive leaders when she extracted free services from vendors. So, each week, my client counterpart would ask for free stuff. Often, she would try to guilt me into providing additional services at no cost by saying, “A firm like yours should have known that we would need this scope of work.”

 

I replied, “Well, we did recognize the need; however, you did not ask for it in your request for proposals. If we had added this scope of work beyond your request, our bid would have been higher than the others, and we wouldn’t have been selected. I’ll be more than happy to develop a change order.” We repeated these Kabuki theatrics throughout the engagement. Given that they were such a pain to work with, we doubled the budget contingency in the change orders from 15% to 30%, and she understood why.

 

She would also yell at me when things went wrong. Once, the response time for a new payroll system function took more than two minutes from the time you pressed the “enter” key to when the response was displayed. After she stopped yelling at me, I said we would look into it. One of my technical experts found that a switch was incorrectly set. When the switch was reset, the response time was under a second. It was a simple fix, and there was no call for yelling, but you will eventually have a customer like this. So be ready: stay calm, and fix the problems.

 

Later, we compared every item on 3,400 earning statements from the old payroll system with every item on the 3,400 earning statements generated by the new payroll system. We had hundreds of discrepancies on the first test. The client was furious: “There are too many &*%#@ problems!”

 

I tried to calmly respond, “We will investigate and explain every single discrepancy.”

 

The first group of discrepancies related to how the data was converted. After we fixed the conversion data, half of the discrepancies went away. Second, we resolved a large number of discrepancies by adjusting the software settings. For example, one employee had 12 child support deductions, but the maximum child support deduction setting was at 10. After we increased the number of deductions allowed to a maximum of 15, the problem was resolved. Next, there was a discrepancy due to a different interpretation of a tax rule that was allowable and explainable. Finally, we found that one problem was due to the old payroll system, which had made an erroneous calculation. I made a deal with her: Please stop yelling at me when things go wrong, and I’ll fix the problems.

 

At the end of this 18-month project, my team of 11 consultants got up to leave the project site, and not one person on the client’s team said good-bye. Later, I said to her, “I’ll never work for your agency again.”

 

She laughed and said, “I don’t blame you!”