Today , the topic will be of project’s expectations. And this will be true no matter what kind of project it is. Be it IT , Infrastructure or Electrical projects , managing the expectations of the stakeholders are very very important yet consistently it is never held close to the management.

I am more familiar with the IT projects by various reasons , not to mention my own career , so I will focus on these specifically. What usually happens in IT projects is as follows ,  

1. Management holds meetings amongst themselves
2. Management decides what to “buy”
3. Management orders what system changes to be implemented
4. Management “discovers” unhappiness from those below them
5. Management conducts fact finding surveys or more meetings with employees
6. Management forms committee to handle such issues
7. Management announces what will be done to resolve the issues
8. Management gets favorable feedback duing such meetings from own committee members
9. Management declares that issues have been resolved

And that is the gist of what usually happens in most IT projects and how nothing get done by people who has no idea what is actually happening. So in another word , nobody knows what happened and what was done by who to cause or resolve issues.

There never was a clear line of vision from start to the end. Its always “he says” , “she said” , “they said” and so on. Bottlenecks are never identified in advance and frankly nobody cares what is the root cause overall because it is always someone else’s problem. And everyone always have to attend some unrelated meetings and listen to terms and gibberish that one has no interest in.

Most importantly , nobody asks the person who has been assigned to do the work and simply assumes that this person has the sufficient knowledge and experience to work on the tasks that he or she has been assigned to. And of course , if that wasn’t done as expected , then it is purely his or her problem and nothing happens to the person who originally assigned the task.

The end result of all these is that not only nothing get done by nobody , the actual work consists of trying to think of why tasks are not get done by deadline. It becomes excuse factory and not work.

End of Rant