That time when a routine assignment led to a stakeholder showdown

I’m doing great. Thank you.

Well, I think you and I were talking, uh, a while ago about, uh, about this story and I, ironically, I just told it about, I don’t know, two or three days ago to somebody who we were having breakfast and it came up, came and, uh, so this is a story, um, that is the, this the company that I worked for. It was partly the horror on our side that we created and partly the horror on the client side. And, uh, everyone will remain nameless. So perfect as to protect the guilty. The story actually starts earlier than when you and I were talking about this story. I. And so we were working on, I was working on a consulting firm and we were working on a big pharmaceutical project here in town. I was the only employee that lived in this town. Uh, we didn’t have anybody else here, but the client was in a, a, a place up the road. So my boss called One Day, I was a senior project manager. Principal consultant, he called me one day and he said, Hey, could you just roll over? They’re gonna be doing some training. Can you just roll over and check on the project? I’m hearing some things. I wanna find out how things are going, so sure, happy to go and roll over there and see what’s going on. So I sit down in the training session and um, the training session starts and mm-hmm. At the first break, the project sponsor comes over and says, I’m sending everybody back to work. Canceling training and uh, okay. And so I said, tell me a little bit about why you’re canceling training and, and, and it really came down to the trainer coming to the class and saying, what do you wanna learn about today? What is your goal for training? Which is a traditional training question to ask, right. But the people were sitting there saying, we came to training to learn how to use this new system that you’ve built for us. And he said, sure, but what do you really wanna get out of training? And so it’s, it was just not a good, a good thing. And so, um, she had made her decision that she was sending everybody after two hours, sending them back to work. By the way.

Well, to be fair, to be fair, um, it was not going well. So that was kind of the thing that started it. But the content itself that was necessary for. Transmitting the knowledge about this new production control document management system. Mm-hmm. It was not good. It just objectively, I didn’t even know anything about the project, but I could tell when I got there that it was not good. So I, I said, well, and the project manager that was assigned to the project wasn’t anywhere around, I don’t even to this day, know where he, he was, but he wasn’t on site for the, for this training. I asked her if she would go ahead. This is a multi-day training, and I asked her if she would go ahead and have everybody come back in the morning. Told her I would have it fixed. I had no idea what needed to be done to fix it, but I would, we would have it. We would have something fixed in the morning. So she was dubious, but she agreed. I went back, took the team back to hotel and um, and, uh. Technical lead showed up in the lobby at the time I asked him to, but the training lead didn’t. So I called him and I said, Hey, I need you to come down. We gotta talk about what, what needs to be done to make the client happy. And he said, no, I’m not coming down. He actually got on an airplane and went back to Baltimore. So here I am with this guy I’ve never met. This technically that I’ve never met. And I’m sitting with him and I say, what should we do? And he says, well, we, this training has never been good. And they don’t listen. They didn’t listen to me ’cause I’m just the engineer. So I asked him, what would, what do you think it would take to make this training good? And we literally sat there all day and all night and rebuilt the next day of training. So at five o’clock in the morning, I got in the car and I drove to. Kinko’s and I had them produce that day’s set of training material. And then that guy and I ran the training the very next day. So the engineer and the guy who knew nothing about the project ran the training. So at the end of the day, now understand. I had only met this engineer maybe less than 24 hours earlier before we started this training. By the end of the training session, the people in the class were asking us how often we had done this before because it looked like, you know, some comedy show that it was good positive comedy show, not, not a big joke. And so, um, but we still had another day of training to do. And so we, we did the same thing again that night and rebuilt the next day of training, came back and gave the training. Well, that turned out to be probably the biggest mistake of my life, saving the training because what that got me invited into, I basically, I told my boss up in Baltimore, this is a little bit of a concern. Here’s what I would do. And he said, okay, well go do it. Like, well, the other project manager’s gonna get ticked at me. This is his project, and you’re asking me to stomp around in his project A couple of days later, now we get to the part of this story that I was telling you. Mm-hmm. Uh, get invited by this guy. Uh, he says, Hey, I’m kind of new to the project. He came, had come down from New Jersey. He said, I’m new to the project, trying to get my hands around what’s going on. And he says, come have lunch with me. Okay, so I come have lunch with him. We’re walking around. This is a manufacturing plant for pharmaceuticals. Lots and lots of people in the lunchroom. In the middle of the lunchroom is this eight top table, completely empty. All eight chairs were completely empty, which was kind of weird. There was no sign on it. There was nothing to indicate that it was reserved or anything like that. So we go in, we get our lunch trays and we come out and it turn, the table is still empty. So he says, how about if we sit, how about if we sit here? And so we sat down, started eating, and then one by one, each of those other chairs filled up, and each of those other chairs were filled by a person who was a stakeholder in the project. Who all wanted me to explain why their, their project was kind of a bonfire. They had loads of questions they wanted to get answers to. Now, this project was supposed to go live in about two and a half, three months, maybe four, I don’t remember. It was a long time ago, but some number of. Short number of months. Where’s our training plan? Well, what do you mean? This was other, there were three groups involved and two of them had not yet had their training. What do you mean? Where’s your training plan? You, the, your project manager hasn’t given you a training plan, hasn’t worked with you on training plan. What’s our rollout plan? When do we get to see the beta version? Like you haven’t seen the, you haven’t even seen it and it’s three months out from. Go live. Like, so we going all around this. They, they sabotaged me, they waylaid me, they invited me to a meal and then just tackled me. So I had to go back and talk to the boss.

Yeah. Well, the, the, the big challenge was that their company owed our company a couple hundred thousand dollars. And I didn’t know that at this point yet, and they owed it to us, but technically we probably hadn’t earned it. So, um, so, so yeah, I mean, I think there’s an element of. The informality of it. It just was when you’re not ready, when you’re the person who’s just coming in to, literally, my charter in this was, Hey, just go check on things and let me know how, how, what the temperature of the, of the client is. Well, I got the temperature of the client, that’s for sure. But no, you know, nobody prepares you for that kind of thing. I. When, when were you ever in a class where they said, oh, and by the way, if you’re on a million plus dollar contract and all of a sudden you find yourself surrounded by eight hostile people or seven hostile people, here’s what you do. They don’t teach you that in project manager school. Maybe they do now, but they didn’t then. It’s just not a thing that you get trained in. You just are, whoa. Well, that happened.

Yeah. I think that’s important and I think it’s important to, to hire people and train people who have an aptitude for being able to not say the off the cuff things when they’re in those high pressure situations. This is not the first time I’ve been in that sabotage, um, space, either, like you and I were talking about that other story. And you have to be, you. You can’t create a liability for your company by giving, you know, well, I’m just being honest. Uh, I’m just being, I’m just being transparent. There’s, there’s transparency and then there’s risk increasing transparency. So it’s transparency.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. Right. All caps don’t be transparent. Right. Yeah. So that started a, a process that was absolutely one of the most challenging three months, four months of our, of my professional career, to be honest with you. Um, and I’ll spare all the, all the crazy details, but there were all kinds of. Um, webs and crazy things that we entered into. There was a, um, there was a, there was just a lot. Um, and that’s the work, the work that had to be done was severely behind. We ended up having to drop, um, two of the three functional areas because we just couldn’t get the system. That we couldn’t extend the system that far. They were so far behind. There was no way we could accomplish the deadline. So what we did was we ended up phasing it into two phases in which we could get the primary deliverable out by the deadline, which was the one that kept the plant running, which seems like the most important one. The marketing team then took a slightly delayed. Uh, availability by, by a couple of weeks, not by months, but by a couple of weeks. And then the legal team that was part of it, they just, they just determined that they did not need to be in the scope and out of the scope they went. Then this is a program that is governed by the Code of Federal Regulations. So if you’ve ever heard of a, a validated project, it basically means that if you are doing this project. You are required to follow very rigorous and specific procedures for, for almost the chain of custody for information. So you have to write a spec, you have to do a test plan, you have to get the test results, you have to document them. And if you mess up, then you write something called a deviation, and that deviation explains the what and the how, and the why and the who, and it’s a very specific format. Then you sign it at the end and it has to be approved. And there are rules about how you can approve it. And if you mess up, you have to write a deviation on a deviation. And if you mess up that deviation, you have to write a deviation on. Deviation on deviation starts sounding like a Dr. Seuss. Um, and, and I can tell you that when your project is, uh, three or four months behind, when you get it, you have to work all night. Sometimes, and it’s awful, but you have to do it. And when you mess up in the middle of the night because you’re tired, because you’ve been running for 48 hours straight without sleep. You write a deviation and you can’t sign your deviation, you have to have somebody else sign it, which means you have to wake them up and fax them a deviation. ’cause it’s supposed to be a wet signature, which means you actually put a pen on a paper. You can’t do it digitally. So they have to do it, and you have to do it, and they send a fax, but then they have to mail you. It’s crazy. So we spent a long time. I joke to people, I tell people I have a hundred years of project management experience, and they say, how can you have a hundred years of a project management experience? And I say, well, you’ve never been a project manager. Because if you have, you know that. A year of project management might be five years of your life, might even be 10 years of your life. This was probably 10 years of my life packed into three months. I had a hotel room in New Jersey. It went up for two day trip, and I came back three weeks later. I do not glorify the hustle and grind.

That’s, that’s right. Uh, at least it didn’t fall out. That’s right. So I have a friend here in from Oxford, North Carolina and he’s got this great sort of country accent he always says, and Dave, it’s better to have your hair turned gray than to turn out, so Love it. Yeah. Wisdom from Larry. Um, I, Larry’s a good guy. He wasn’t on this project, different company, so. We’re up there, we’re doing all kind of crazy stuff. I got my engineer guy, he is, uh, he’s burning the midnight oil over and over and over again for us, and one day he says to me, um, I have to go home. Like I, he says I have to pay the rent and I can’t pay the rent because this is back before we had. All of the online payment platforms, I have to write a check in. My checkbook is at home. I don’t have a way to get rent to my to my apartment complex. So we sent him home. He said, but don’t worry, I’ll work. It’s okay. Rest, go home. Well, I think it was Michigan was where he, where he lived at the time. He went to Michigan, and I don’t even know, I think the plane landed and he started working. And so I, I told him at one point I said, Hey, have you eaten anything? No, no, I don’t have time to eat. So I said, all right. And, and in about 10 minutes, your doorbell’s gonna ring, answer it. I already paid for the pizza. Just take the pizza and eat the pizza. So then he came back and he, at some point in this process, he, he actually moved here. To Raleigh where I live in North Carolina. And, um, I don’t remember the details about that, but that, that’s important at the end of this story. So we’re working, we’re doing all this stuff. We’re making progress. My boss comes up from Baltimore up to New Jersey during this three week period where we’re working a 130 hours a week, which is literally what we did. He comes up, he says, I don’t have any idea how to help you guys. I’m here, give me something to do. So, you know, we gave him something to do and he helped and it was, it was fantastic. And in the middle of it, the project manager on our side quit. He got really mad that I was there and, and he just quit. And then his counterpart at the client, their senior project manager also quit. Cause kind of the jig was up right. At that point. Everybody knew. This project wasn’t going anywhere. It was behind. It was in trouble. We don’t really know what the deal was with them. Then I got embroiled in some weird HR thing at the client where there was some fight between a couple of their employees and they, somehow tried to drag me into it. I ended up in this HR meeting with the client’s, hr, where they were grilling me about this situation that I had absolutely no knowledge about. I called my HR people, they called their HR people. It was a big mess. I’m like, guys, I just need to get this project out. Leave me alone. Uh, and, and then about a week before the go live. The project champion, the person who was my main contact there also quit. So I ended up basically running the client’s program with their head of validation and their, and their, their validation engineer, the three of us became the project team running this project to the end. And now I live about maybe 25 minutes away from the plant. And so I would be there at two, three o’clock in the morning. Early on in the project, my wife would drive out, she’d bring me a change of clothes and I would change. So I would look, let’s sort of not smell bad the next day and that kinda thing, but eventually it was just, it didn’t matter. Everybody knew this was a grind. We were, we were all in it together. And I left the plant one morning. I think it was two o’clock in the morning. It might have been three. I could not, I could not see straight. There was a hotel on the way. I stopped at the front desk and I said, Hey, I need, I need to know, do you have any rooms? I just need to get a couple hours of sleep. And they, yeah, we got one. And they looked at my license and they said, I. You’re like 15 minutes away from your house, I’m not gonna make it. So I, so I, I, they gave me the room. They charged me half the price since the time, I guess since the night was half over already. I was supposed to be on a call at seven o’clock in the morning and I did, I slept through the wake up call my alarm, everything. And it was with the. Client. So my boss was on the call and the main client was on the call and I wasn’t on the call. And later my, my boss told me that they didn’t know where I was. And the client said, well, I really hope he stopped somewhere and he got some sleep because he knew how bad it, it, it was, it was on us. Well, we got all of this done. We grew the account 20%. I think at that point, that’s when my engineer friend moved down here to Raleigh. And he had a, had a, a Jeep and a apartment. He was from another country and one of the best guys I’ve ever, ever worked with, but he was here on a work visa. And so my boss said, Hey, you guys did a great job. You grew the account by 20%. Instead of losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’m gonna put you on the bench work on bench projects. We’re working on internal project, and then somebody on the seventh floor at about maybe a month or two after that seventh floor said, anybody with a project utilization of 20% or less, you’re outta here. So they fired us because we were not, we were not billable people, uh, at the, at the time that caused him to have to go home. He didn’t have work authorization anymore. Right, right, right. And when that happens, you get 48 hours. So we um, I didn’t realize

Yeah. Oh, it’s fast. It’s at least it was fast. I don’t know what it is now ’cause I’m not, I’m not very conversant in it now, but it was literally 48 hours. So we’re trying to figure out what do we do with his stuff, you know, he’s gotta break his lease and he has this, this car loan, so like, hey. Bring the Jeep to my house. Give me power of attorney, I’ll sell it for you. And then you just pay off the note when once we were able to sell it, um, shouldn’t be too hard. It was a nice jeep, whatever. Um, so we look at his agreement, the agreement with the bank says, Hey, you have to let us know if the primary location of the vehicle changes ’cause it’s the banks right. Right. So we, we let ’em know that the Jeep’s gonna be at my place. I have, we have the power of attorney, we send him a copy of the Power of attorney that night, they repossessed the Jeep. So needs to move.

Apparently. Well, so you know, like he comes out, his Jeep’s not there, so he calls the police, right? Geez, somebody stole my Jeep. And it turns out they say no, there’s, they do some investigation or whatever, and. The bank took it, and so I called the bank. What are you guys doing? I have power of attorney so they can, they’re allowed to talk to me and they’re like, well, we didn’t know if he was gonna drive it in the lake or anything. So he ended up getting an attorney. So he’s a, he’s now back in his home country. I have all of his stuff in my garage. We’re figuring out what to do with it. My kids still play with the we that he, uh, that he left with us. So it still works and they still play with it. This is easily 15 years ago. So he ended up, he ended up getting an attorney. The bank paid him the full face value of the Jeep. He was able to buy his parents a nice home in his home country with the amount of money that he got back from the Jeep. I had the opportunity after that to put in a bid to buy the group that laid me off, which was kind of cool.

I didn’t, because we ended up not being able to come to terms sort of our best and final was I think really, really generous to them for the amount of headcount we were gonna take off of their hands. And they overvalued the intellectual property as a lot of times people are our, a lot of times people do, but more importantly, the pipeline was eroding and we, we had ways of knowing how. What the condition of the pipeline was, and it was kind of a bad faith negotiation. So I withdrew the offer because there was no way that I could commercialize it with the funding I had to raise. But it was a fun experiment.

Um, I think there’s a couple of aspects of that. Uh, one thing is that during that period of time, I sacrificed a whole lot of stuff personally. Um, I mentioned that I went up for two days and I came back three weeks later. I did come back for two days in between because it was, was my son’s birthday and he was, I don’t know, he might’ve been five or six years old, I think maybe, maybe a little older. It doesn’t matter how old he was. I came back for, for my son’s birthday, but it was not a foregone conclusion that I was gonna be able to come back. And so, um. There was, you know, not a lot of peace and sanity at our house during this period. It was unhealthy. It was what needed to be done. And so there’s a tension between being a person who does what needs to be done and putting everything on the line. And what I learned was that the, the end result is not guaranteed. So trading a. Trading a certain, uh, now like a, a defined, well-known good now for some future payoff is a risk because the future payoff doesn’t always come. So a lot of, a lot of startup culture is built on live grind. You know, do what you gotta do now so that you can have this big payoff later. And it’s almost assumed that the payoff is guaranteed. So even though this wasn’t a startup, I didn’t have options. That’s a different story. It’s a very different set of stories. It’s the same, it’s the same. Operating mechanic, do a lot of work right now because it’s the right thing to do and trade off your present circumstance because in the future it’s gonna be so much better. And I think right now I am less inclined to make that kind of trade off because I learned from both stock options that were worth nothing or building an account and growing the account in spite of everything and doing the heroic thing. I ended up getting laid off and the guy I worked with got laid off and deported and, and, and, and so it’s important to, in the calculus of doing this work, what am I trading off now? Because I think there’s a certain future. And really evaluating whether or not that future is as certain as we think it is. ’cause lots of things that could have gone wrong and didn’t, thankfully.

Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know that it has to be that binary, to be honest with you. And I think this is where as leaders and founders, um, in particular, we have to be willing to tell a different story than that. So yeah, there are things if you wanna build a unicorn, I guess that’s true. Um, but if you look at all of the statistics, that optimism is incredibly poorly placed. So as leaders and as founders, we have to see the opportunity, but we have to really understand what we’re asking people to trade as a person. I can’t ethically go and say to people, Hey, go ahead and lose your family, lose your relationships with your kids because someday we might be rich, right? And. That, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t do something meaningful, and it doesn’t mean we can’t do something big. It just means that we have to adjust our time horizon for what we’re trying to accomplish, and I think that that makes a big difference.

Yeah. Yep. I, I think it’s important to be honest with ourselves about what we’re willing to trade

Uh, there’s so many, um, things to learn. You know, when you, when you get called into the, into the client’s office and, and they say, Hey, we’re not gonna pay you the $400,000 that we owe you ’cause we have to pay it to somebody else to fix what you guys broke. You know, you can, as the person who. Showed up, you know, Hey, just go check on things. Find out how they’re going. That’s, that was my charter. Hey, things are here. Then, you know, they, they owe us $400,000. Thanks for letting me know that before I walked into his office. Um, you, you’re confronted with a, a, a really important choice in that moment, which is, am I gonna engage or am I gonna figure out how to get out of this? Am I gonna, am I gonna meet the, the client where they are? Again, this is stuff they never teach you. In project management school, they teach you how to calculate net present value and burn rate Gant charts and how to build a Gantt chart. But, but when you’re sitting there in front of the customer and they’re upset because it’s almost half a million dollars in AR that you’re supposed to be collecting and they can’t and they’re angry with you, how do you move them from being angry with you to paying you a million and a quarter by the time it’s over? Well, there’s only, there’s only one way I know to do that, and that’s to shut up and listen, right? To say, tell me what’s wrong. I don’t know what’s wrong From your perspective, I can hold space for you to be emotional about it because you know your job’s on the line as a client. You’ve got this project that you’ve committed. Here’s the severity for that client, the DA. Issue. Something called a 4 83. And a 4 83 basically shuts your pharmaceutical manufacturing plant down. If you produce a million dollars worth of product every single day through your plant, and you get a 4 83, you can calculate the cost of loss as basically a million dollars a day for every time, every day that that plant is offline and that plant. That’s just the revenue, not the cost. So you got all these employees that are mill employees about and don’t have anything to do, and it takes more than a day to restart a manufacturing facility and operation. So if you get a 4 83, you’re probably looking at the minimum of three to $5 million. So that’s what this guy has to deal with. You have a project that you’re not delivering on, and I have a very real risk that I’m going to be costing my company three to $5 million minimum if I don’t fix it, but I don’t know how to fix it. We gotta really understand why a customer is frustrated. We gotta, we gotta own the problem without admitting anything, and we don’t have to admit anything as long as we can come up with a forward-looking plan. That’s where a lot of this stuff goes wrong, is we get a defensive mode. Well, your guy, your project manager, and our project manager, and, and who cares? What we gotta do is say. What does success look like and, and is there any chance that we can get there? And that’s the big lesson is don’t get defensive, just listen. And then go into the perspective of who do we need here in the room in order to come up with a plan that gets us from point A to point B? And then what resources do we need? How do we get there? How do we communicate about that? On a daily, hourly, whatever basis that you need in order to help you have the confidence that we can actually get there. And that’s a, that’s probably the biggest lesson to take away from that, from a project management standpoint of, of any of the many that there are.

Yeah. To uh.

Yeah. And just because you do it once doesn’t mean you’ve mastered it.

Yeah, the norm. Mm-hmm.

Well, the project was about a million dollar project and um, we delivered. Maybe a little bit more than a third of it. ’cause we had to do the marketing stuff, but also the marketing stuff was a lot smaller piece. Um, and we ended up in a basically 20% growth over what the original contract value was. So here’s the cap of the story. Love it. The fun part. So the head of validation was here in Raleigh and their headquarters is in New Jersey. He’s a private pilot. After the project was all done and dusted and all the final paperwork was done and payments were made, he called me and he said, Hey, I want you to come with me in my private airplane, this little, I guess little Cessna or whatever. Um, I’m going to fly all of the validation paperwork up to New Jersey and I want you to go with me to deliver it. So this is a stack of paper that’s, I’m six foot four. It’s as tall as me. The stack of paper is six foot tall. Wow. So I had to go get special dispensation from my, my management team up in Baltimore and the risk managers and whatever to get on this guy’s private airplane. And they said, look, if you sign off this piece of paper, ’cause they had a thing, all business travel had to be commercial aviation, but if you sign this piece of paper, we’ll let you fly up with him and deliver the, the paperwork to, to their headquarters. So I signed the piece of paper and then I get another call from him and he says. Hey, listen, bad news, I did the math. You know, weight is a thing in a, in a small airplane, he said. You and me or me in the paper, but I can’t take you and me and the paper. That’s

So I’m really sorry. I would love for you to be able to go with me to carry this in and deliver it to my managers, but I’m gonna have to do this. If you wanna fly commercially up here, that’s great. But my, my bosses wouldn’t pay for it. And, and I just said, you know, go ahead do it. But just to be invited on the man’s private plane to deliver the paper. Is was more than ever being able to recover the revenue or grow the revenue, even the delivering of the thing. That to me was the success that the client knew I was bought in enough to his success, that he would be willing to take me up and back in his private airplane to deliver the paperwork to his bosses, which was super cool.

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