No Good Deed...

Lessons In Taking Advantage

My very first lesson in Project Management came from the man I worked for who set me on this path:

"No good deed goes unpunished"

Kevin was a fantastic manager. He led with a sense of worldly understanding I am quite convinced I'll never achieve. That very understanding is what made him approach projects with a wonderful 'you shall not pass with that scope creep nonsense' and I learned the most from this mentality.

It's completely logical. No one wants to have advantage taken, or be left holding the responsibility for something going awry that wasn't properly documented. I used to wake up and panic that very thing had happened on many projects when I started out as a PM, convinced I was putting everyone at risk.

Except...

It's a mentality I absolutely hate.

CYA, or strategic butt coverage, is the metaphorical hand washing of accepting responsibility and squaring it directly upon someone else. You can spot it everywhere you look. I don't know about you, but my Mum put the fear of bejeezus in me when I was growing up to be honest, and accept my part in everything, not find a way out of it entirely.

What's settled into my projects is rationalising what a 'good deed' will do.

Absolutely I'll recommend giving my time for free if it guarantees repeat business and a customer getting to clear a project in budget. It's a no-brainer to apply a logical change if it guarantees a safe implementation.

What's the punishment to those decisions in the grand scheme of things? Realistically, probably none. Costs can be spread elsewhere, an engineer can avoid risk if sense is applied.

Obviously there are plenty of good deeds that will absolutely ruin a day. I once ran an entire project without an Initiation Document, something PRINCE2 teaches to have in day 1 of training never to do. That this happened around 9 years ago proves how much sleep I lost over it. I had immense pressure from the customer and Account Manager to start the project anyway, even without approval against the basic deliverables. A good deed was demanded of me and boy was I punished for it:

• Endless timelines

• Constant changes I couldn't track because there was no approved baseline

• Refusal to accept when what I understood the project to be was delivered

It took the retirement of the CFO and scouring emails for literally any written acknowledgement of a deliverable to make the case for project closure. It went on for months longer than it should have. It unwittingly became the reason I started a Lessons Learned Forum in the company. What royally pissed me off was the point blank refusal of the customer and AM to take any responsibility for the issues they caused. Still, I eventually got the customer to concede to specific deliverables and after far too long, they admitted everything had been delivered, and off I went with "no good deed" tattooed behind my eyelids.

Still, the reward of that was the Forum, the ability to show how many times I have messed up and learned how not to next time. That project was 9 years ago, like I said, and it's still the standard to which I hold basic project management to: is there a scope, is it signed, is it paid for?

The give and take of my attitude now is wildly different to the wide-eyed ingénue I used to be, terrified of putting a foot wrong and angering or worse, inconveniencing, a peer or a better. Heaven forbid I should be a problem! My favourite customer is a tiny solicitor's firm of about 50 people. They regularly need to roll out improvements and they don't always comprehend the full impact, so it's sometimes under scoped. I've given them roughly four days free of charge because it means they don't run out of money to implement critical changes and they come back again and again for the service. I would do that again and again if it means a happy and well looked after customer.

Ultimately, it's a swing and a roundabout, but I will maintain that if Kev ever reads this, good deeds can definitely be unpunished.