Skip to Content
97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know
book

97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know

by Barbee Davis
August 2009
Beginner
252 pages
6h 2m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know

Chapter 81. The Fallacy of Status

Udi Dahan

image with no caption

AFTER A SUCCESSFUL FIRST PROJECT, I confidently embarked on my second. This was a larger project, it was more strategic to my employer, and I would manage a multidisciplinary team of people. I was sure that the skills that had served me the first time around wouldn't fail. Interestingly enough, it was my trust in my team's status reports that was my eventual undoing.

About two months into the project, my infrastructure team lead confessed, "It turns out some of the architectural assumptions we made were unfounded." However, he assured me that, "We'll be back on track by the end of the month." Despite his reassurances and the contingency buffers I had in place, I couldn't dismiss the sense that something was wrong.

At the end of the month, I followed up with the same team lead. He showed me how the refactoring work had been completed on schedule and how the developers were all set to hit their targets for the coming month. When I sat down with my integration team lead, she notified me that everything looked good from her vantage point, too. Modules were complying with their specifications, each had been sufficiently tested, and all the multiple layers of the architecture tested stable enough for the first integration.

After a slightly bumpy first integration (as many of them are) and a regular quality assurance cycle, I was astounded to discover ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know

97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know

Gunther Verheyen
97 Things Every SRE Should Know

97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Emil Stolarsky, Jaime Woo

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596805425Errata Page