Ivory towers jeopardize value creation

Embrace the learning culture!

I vividly remember my years as a waterfall project manager. I was earnestly doing the best I could, but in hindsight, I can see how I sometimes failed miserably. One of these disasters is a great example of bad ivory tower behaviour.

The goal of the project was to repair a financial regulation issue. I had an architect who designed a high-level solution. After careful review, the solution was approved. Then a senior software engineer created the detailed solution. 4 months in, once this was also reviewed and approved, I asked the development team to create the solution.

To my big surprise, the development team said “Don’t bother. We already deployed our solution 2 months ago. We quickly found a way that we thought would work and it indeed proved to be the case. You burned all these hours for nothing. We informed your architect, but he ignored us.”

Now, you would expect the leaders to be happy. We needed to solve a regulation issue and the development team did this quickly and effectively. But no, they told the development team to work on the architect’s solution instead. Only he was allowed to propose changes to the system. His way was the only way.

This truly happened! That development team never forgave me for my inaction. I could have defended then and I didn’t do this. It was the next straw on the camel’s back, which was about to break.