The developers will rise up
For those of you not from a technical background, dealing with technical people may seem a bit alien. This is the story of what happened when Cara (who reported into the sales organization) attempted to run a technical project.
I don’t recall Cara’s title, but she was the interface between the customer and the development team. We were working on a customization of our product for the customer, so there was a to be a lot of communications between her and the team. During the initial phase, one of our more cranky engineers was assigned to complete the project. Cara was new, we didn’t know anything about her. Mr. Cranky was in his heart a decent guy, but did not suffer idiots. Within two days, Mr. Cranky was complaining about Cara. We were not surprised about this, as Mr. Cranky complained a fair amount. About a week in, Mr. Cranky told his manager that he refused to work with her and demanded to be put on another project. No one in the development team was surprised.
Over the course of the next two months, it seemed as if the engineers were added to the project than left. After half of the engineers unsuccessfully tried to work with Cara, several of them got together for a beer in the kitchen one evening to discuss Cara. They decided that Cara had to go. Several of the senior engineers approach the VP of development and told him of the problems with Cara and that the team was refusing to work with her. The VP listened to the issues and told the engineers he would escalate it to the executives.
After the escalation, they tried using sales engineers for the project. The sales engineers were unable to work with her either. The project ended up failing.
Cara considered engineers as interchange widgets and that engineers were a cast of “untouchables”. Her disdain for engineering contributed to her failure, but was not the root case. The two main problems which made it impossible for her project to succeed were a lack of understanding and a refusal to communicate.
The problem was that Cara could not communicate the proper requirements to the team. She would communicate requirements which were completely in left field. The requirements were obviously not something any customer would want. Development asked her for clarifications, and she would shout buzzwords at the engineers then return to her office. The development team attempted to get direct access to the customer, but she refused to allow anyone other than herself talk to them.
Cara was a one trick technical pony, she only understood one technical item, and mapped every problem into the one thing she understood. Cara joined our company and was placed on the project immediately. Her previous two companies were in the same domain, with those previous projects all using the one particular technology to solve the problem. Unfortunately, this time the problem (and the solution) were different. Cara didn’t understand the problem the customer was trying to solve, which doomed the project to failure. She could no longer keep spewing buzzwords at the team and get them to build the solution. Cara refused to seek help for herself (or the company) by allowing another person to communicate with the customer, which further contributed to the failure.
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