Taken over the project from subcontractor and trying to finish it with your team? Nice move – now you have a lot of additional work to do, but you also have control over the whole process and you can manage things effectively.
Agreed with the customer that they would order hardware passing by your standard vendors? Delivery date is now (magically) 2 weeks earlier and chances are better that you won’t go over time, although your vendors don’t love you anymore.
Fired your primaballerina and struggling to delegate her duties to the rest of the team? Morale +2. Respect +1. Integration +1. Cost-effectiveness +3. Sleepless nights +3.
Stopped your work when the customer is not willing to sign terms agreed before, just days before launch date? Signed agreement will be on your fax another morning. Or maybe you’ll lose the project, but in that case chances are good that it wouldn’t be profitable anyway.
I know I flatten a bit above, but all those cases really happened. All of them were risky. A couple of them very risky. But every one of them appeared as a good decision after all. We’re afraid of bold moves but, when done with serious thought before, they’re usually right thing to do. Usually we’re just forced to choose those paths by circumstances, but that doesn’t matter. The most important thing here is to be able to make a right choice (even when it’s bold). Many people can’t do that even when this is the only rational way of acting. Even when keeping status quo is the straight line to catastrophe.
I’ll be on holidays to the end of June so expect some silence here.
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