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Transcription by PWOP Productions, http://www.pwop.com
Page 11 of 18
Pat Hynds on why projects fail
April 16, 2009
Pat Hynds:
Most people get deep down in
status late in the project when it's much harder to fix
things.
Richard Campbell:
Yeah, status tends to be bad
news.
Pat Hynds:
Right. Well, not in our
organization. We've got a system now where
everybody that works in all the companies I'm
associated with where “no status no check.”
Richard Campbell:
Interesting, yeah, amazing how
motivated people are.
Pat Hynds:
Well, you don't get paid if you
don't put in a status and if you don't put in a status
then we assume you were not working so we can
charge you vacation or we can just call it job
abandonment. It doesn't come down to that because
we look people in the eyes and say I will fire you, no
matter how brilliant you are, no matter how important
you are, if you don't send me the status regularly.
Richard Campbell:
Right.
Pat Hynds:
The never guess thing is,
you’ve just got to say show me. If you have an
opinion and no proof, I'll pick my opinion over your
opinion at any day. So we just kind of torture people
over their guesses and say, okay, show me that, to
make sure that they're not guessing. Don't be wishful
is all about if you haven't confirmed it with the
customer, and the customer could be me, then
confirm with them, it's not true, you have no basis of
really believing that the customer understands that
this is going to work this way unless you’ve shown it
to them and explain it to them and demo it. Then the
last rule is probably, I won't say it's the most important
but it's the one that starts the seeds of destruction
which is no spec, no estimate.
Carl Franklin:
I love it.
Richard Campbell:
Yeah.
Pat Hynds:
I will work for you TNM from
now on until the end of time and happily rewrite,
recode, rework...
Carl Franklin:
TNM, define that.
Pat Hynds:
Time and materials.
Richard Campbell:
Just bill them by the hour.
Pat Hynds:
It means you hire a landscaper
and they come in and they do the work, and if they
work for 50 hours because you told them to dig up the
same tree five times and move it, you pay for it.
Richard Campbell:
Yup.
Pat Hynds:
Fixed bid. I want a house.
Okay. You're never going to build a house on TNM
but if you do your builder will love you because you'll
never be done and it will cost you billions of dollars.
Richard Campbell:
Yeah.
Pat Hynds:
But a lot of people want a fixed
bid price when they give a TNM spec.
Richard Campbell:
Yes.
Pat Hynds:
I'll give you an example. I have
a client that we dealt with a couple of years ago.
Good client, but we had to educate them. They
walked us through their existing application and told
us what they didn't like about it and then expected a
fixed bid proposal for the new system and I said okay,
so I understand what you want but here's an analogy.
If I walk you through my house and I comment that I
don't like the size of this bathroom, I don't like this
type of countertop, I think this floor is creaky, I don't
like the overall Feng Shui of the building, can you
actually go and build me a house that will make me
happy without an architectural diagram, without a
specification what materials would make me happy?
Richard Campbell:
Right.
Pat Hynds:
All you know is what I'm
annoyed by. You don't know the exact specification
of the thing that would make me happy.
Carl Franklin:
Right.
Pat Hynds:
So you can't fixed bid it and if
you do we're both going to be unhappy at the end of it
because you're going to underestimate; and I'm going
to overestimate and our expectations will never meet.
Richard Campbell:
The reality is going to hit you
eventually...
Carl Franklin:
That's right.
Richard Campbell:
But you're never actually going
to be happy.
Pat Hynds:
Well, it's usually when the court
order comes.
Richard Campbell:
Nice.
Pat Hynds:
But if we as a group,
developers, engineers, architects, can rein in that
failure rate, okay, if we can rein it in so that we fail 5%
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