| Topic Name: |
Dealing with difficult business end-user |
| Message Name: |
Situation calls for an Assessment |
| Date Posted: |
03/24/2002 |
| In Reply To: |
I am an IT engineer working at a financial institution. We are a group of 5 developers reporting to a manager. Typically, we write software solutions required by different lines-of-business within our company. In most projects, the business guys provide us with the requirements, we build the application, we go through a few testing cycles and the application is moved into production. That's our model.
Most of our business users are quite cooperative in providing us with requirements and in understanding timeframes taken to deliver a quality product. Of course, they want the solution right away :-), but they are happy with the stuff that we deliver.
Of late, we are running into a serious problem with a business user. He is under pressure from the business VP to roll out a critical application. He had tried to get a consulting company deliver this, but that did not work out. Now, he has come to our door for help.
However, his attitude is extremely brash. He wants the entire application (which the consulting company failed to deliver after 1 year) ready in 1 month!!! We understand his urgency, but we cannot dump other projects and work for him only. Even then, it will take us a good amount of time to write the application.
Our business user refuses to understand to logic. He throws tantrums. He goes behind our back and promises "demo"s to his boss. Because of this, we had to work for 20 hours on a Saturday and even then this "demo" was just a charade!
Now, this dude wants us to work through Christmas to get another "demo" working.
We are at our wits end in dealing with this guy. We have tried to rationalize with him. But he (worked in the military) does not like any dissent and he refuses to listen to us. Needless to say, our manager has been a wimp in dealing with this guy.
Is this fairly common where IT folks have to work for business end-users? Have you encountered similar situations?
How would you deal with this case?
Thanks..... |
| Message: |
Dear friend,
Depending on whether this business-user you are interacting with has more offers for you in the pipeline and also depending on how influential this person is, I would say that this is a great challenge to accept.
As the first level of assessment, it will be a good idea to do a relationship-analysis with this person to determine how critical this contract really is.
If it is beneficial to you (and your team) to go ahead with this engagement, then you should perform the next level of analysis - technical-analysis.
The fact that a 3rd party consulting company could not deliver doesn't mean that your team will not be able to. From what I understand, many manuals and a lot of code from the 1 year effort will be at your disposal. You can re-mediate this material to help build the solution much faster. At this level, you will need to assess how much time and resources this would require. Once you have a model solution to the problem - it will be much easier to get this person off your back or make him extend the deadline without hassles! He will in turn be able to use this model solution to convince his superiors!
P.S. : Be sure to factor the risks in your project time-line! This way your gestimate will not be highly questionable (because risks are after all non-quantifiable!).
Hope this helps!
Thanks.
DC-US!
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