Make them work weekends

Today, I presented to the project board the fact that we couldn’t deliver all the functionality using the available resources by the deadline. We went through the usual “just get more developers on the job” which I responded “we’ve got 50 man days of effort so lets get 100 developers on the job right now and you’ll have it by this afternoon, right?”. To my surprise they all twigged and realised that more developers wasn’t an option. Fixed resources, fixed deadline (we explored moving it but no way), so the only remaining option is to de-scope the functionality. We embarked on the task of reducing the scope of this phase and deferring features to later phases. The first 20 minutes were very pragmatic. Then a voice from the back of the room piped up…

A new starter from another team was invited along to get an insight into how things are run. This guy’s job title is “Programme Manager”. Obviously very important ;)

…here’s a transcript of the remaining conversation PM is the new Programme Manager:

PM: “what about weekends?”
Me: “what?”
PM: “are they working weekends?”
Me: “no”
PM: “this is ridiculous. We’re sat here torturing ourselves over what features to drop when our developers have lot’s more capacity”
Chair: “what a great idea!”
Senior User: “why’ve you just wasted 20 mins of our time when we could have simply got them to do more work?”
Me: “Well, I could ask them but I’m pretty sure they won’t want to work weekends?”
PM: “ask?!, ask?!,….you don’t ask them you tell them! They’re bloody contractors at the end of the day. If they won’t work when we tell them then terminate them and get contractors in who will. You’ve all got to stop letting these developers dictate to you.”
Chair: “Nice one PM, look’s like we’ll be asking you to join our project board so you can rattle some cages.”