On "Silence" and "Not Listening"
Tanmay Vora
Hal Macomber over at “Reforming Project Management” blog has written an intriguing post “Silence — One of the Two Great Wastes™ — Is a Project and Career Killer” – in the crux of it, “not speaking” and “not listening” are two great wastes that kill projects and often careers. Excellent!
Very recently, I experienced the “two great wastes”.
On one of the projects, the tester failed to raise early alarm bells on the quality of the product. The final release date was nearing and the tester kept on testing silently without any specific communication on the overall project status and open issues. Even the project manager failed to get updates on the quality side of the project and focused too much on meeting the deadline. Communication links were weak and dysfunctional.
In a contrasting experience, when a software tester raised alarm bells to the project manager, the PM just ignored the indication from tester that project may miss its release target because of open issues. The alarm bell raised by tester was taken as granted – as a “routine” thing that testers do. Listening was just not in place.
Do I need to tell what the outcomes of both projects were? – Delayed deliveries, unsatisfied customer and a lot of unnecessary stress on the team.
In different contexts, I have written earlier (links below) about how important project communication is for project/team success.