How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 109. Failure

I’ve worked hard in this book to give you lots of tidy little stories to learn from, each with its own tidy little happy ending. Do you know why all the endings are happy? It may not be what you think…

It’s because I get to choose which stories I tell.

Not every story in my career has had a happy ending. There have been a few unhappy ones, but not too many. Most of the ones that I ended up feeling bad about were situations where I was certain that my team knew the right thing to do, but we just couldn’t convince our client to do it. Getting people to do the right thing is almost always the hardest part of a project.

When you think about the short stories in a book like this, please remember that these events I’ve written about didn’t happen instantaneously, or without loads of setbacks along the way. For example, Richard’s story—such a clean little snap-tight story—took you probably less than 15 minutes to read, but the job we did in that story took four people working full-time (and a few others part-time) three and a half days to do.

I can remember sitting with Richard after almost three hours of grinding, trying to find and isolate the trace data we needed, and wondering how much longer he was going to let us keep trying. Fortunately for everyone’s sake, he wanted relief and he was receptive, technical, calm, attentive, self-aware, and accessible: he scored a perfect 7 on my “Project Risk Magnifiers” checklist. He could have put up his hand at 10:30 the ...