Learning the Hard Way...

William Kling LEAD PROJECT MANAGER| Lumen Fircrest, Wa, United States

We all have projects that have kept us up at night and taught us some very hard lessons. What is your most difficult lesson learned as a PM?

For me, it was early on in my career. I had a client who was in desperate need of a particular service to meet the demands of the holiday season. We delivered the service a little before the established due date and were feeling pretty good about ourselves. A few days after the project closed, I received a call from the client saying that building management had not approved the location of the service and wanted it moved. I was stunned...when we conducted the site survey the IT representative said that the location was fine. Well, as I found out later, the IT rep didn't have the authority to make that decision. It took an additional three weeks to negotiate the changes, move the service and transition it over to the customer. Because of this gaff, I caused my client an immense amount of stress (worrying about being able to fulfill their business needs over the holidays) and it made me look incompetent.

That experience taught me to ensure that I identify all relevant stakeholders up front and understand what their levels of authority are. I also learned to get everything in writing.

Posted: Sep 10, 2019 11:53 PM (Updated by author: Sep 10, 2019 11:56 PM)

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Kiron Bondale Retired | Mentor| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada

We were moving offices back in the early '90's and needed to install Ethernet cabling in our new location. I had done (what I felt was) sufficient due diligence in vendor selection and expected there would be no issues with the wiring install. The install was done on time at end of day Friday and the vendor's staff indicated it worked fine. However, once our movers had moved our workstations and servers over and we hooked them up, the network was clearly down. The vendor's support line was unavailable for the weekend. So, my tech lead and I ended up stringing wiring ourselves over the whole weekend to ensure that our development team wasn't dead in the water on Monday. The vendor eventually showed up Monday afternoon and it took them a few hours to address the issue.

The lesson I learned was when dealing with vendors, no matter how reputable, you can trust but VERIFY!

Kiron

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1 reply by William Kling

Sep 11, 2019 5:40 PM

William Kling

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Thanks for sharing, Kiron. I've learned a lot from vendor interactions over the years. I've also run a lot of cables. Good times!

Posted: Sep 11, 2019 6:46 AM

William Kling LEAD PROJECT MANAGER| Lumen Fircrest, Wa, United States

Sep 11, 2019 6:46 AM

Replying to Kiron Bondale

...

Thanks for sharing, Kiron. I've learned a lot from vendor interactions over the years. I've also run a lot of cables. Good times!

Posted: Sep 11, 2019 5:40 PM (Updated by author: Sep 11, 2019 5:41 PM)

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Learning the Hard Way...

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