This is a true story. The company names
have been changed.
The project
Acme Corporation is an application
development company. They were sub-contracting to Standard Inc., whose Portuguese
client wanted several million dollars worth of modifications to their existing
Human Resources system.
Before each development occurred, the
client would write requirements in Portuguese, and then Standard would
translate those requirements to English, which Acme would use to prepare effort
and cost estimates. All communication between Acme and the client went through
Standard, so Acme and the client never talked directly.
A typical outcome
Acme received a set of translated specifications
from Standard, and based on the stated requirements, estimated that the
modification would take three months and cost about three hundred thousand
dollars. Standard provided the estimate to the client. The client was appalled.
Surely this particular modification was not that big a deal. The client asked
Standard to have Acme break down the price into components to justify the
effort and fees.
Once the client saw the detailed
components and fees, it was obvious that Acme had not understood the
requirements.
The client re-wrote, and Standard re-translated,
the specifications and Acme produced a new estimate of three weeks and thirty
thousand dollars. The client accepted the estimate, and the work was completed
and delivered.
There were many similar situations with
other modifications on the project. Sometimes, the modification would be
installed at the client before anyone discovered that the modification did not
really deliver what the client had asked for.
The project manager repeatedly tried to
convince Standard to allow direct communication between Acme and the client for
clarifying requirements. However, Standard insisted on being the go-between.
Epilogue
The problems continued to occur. The
client felt that Acme was not serving their needs very well. Acme felt that
Standard was the problem, with their sloppy translation of requirements.
The project manager did manage to
continue to deliver modifications, but the client was never totally satisfied
with Acme, and Acme was continually frustrated with Standard. The Acme project
manager left the company after the first year.
Conclusions
Standard had no programmers, analysts,
or technicians assigned to the project. Their main function on the project was
to translate documents from Portuguese to English and back. This was not a
necessary service for Acme, who had already done similar projects for clients
in Spanish, German, Arabic and Japanese-speaking countries.
The problem was not the language
difference. It was the process that was put in place to solve the supposed
language issue. Standard filtered every communication between Acme and the client,
and that filtering caused numerous errors and assumptions.
The Acme project manager failed to find
a way to solve the problem because she was reluctant to discuss the issue with
her own management. She also didn’t figure out the root cause for Standard’s
insistence on continuing the unproductive process.
Standard provided little more than
translation services, but was able to make its money by marking up Acme’s fees when
billing the client. Standard was careful to keep itself between Acme and the
client, in order to prevent the client from eliminating Standard from the
process and the next contract.
The Acme project manager should have discussed
the issue with Acme management. The Acme VP could have encouraged Standard to
provide some of technical or analytical resources for the modification work.
This approach would allow Standard to be involved in a way that provided value
to the client, thereby reducing the chance that they might be eliminated.
Then Standard likely would be more
inclined to allow the Acme team to speak directly with the client to obtain and
clarify requirements. Speaking directly with the client would certainly shed
light on the requests, and allow the client to receive what had been asked for.
The client, in turn, would be more satisfied than with the current arrangement,
and more likely to renew the contract with Standard and Acme.
Multiple parties to a project are a
complicating factor in project management. In this case, the process of
filtering communications through a third party caused a lot of confusion.
Copyright
2015 Debbie Gallagher
