The final Steering Committee of the project. Slide four carries the sentence everybody came for.
“Delivered on time and on budget.”
There is a small round of applause. The sponsor thanks the team, the project is formally closed, and somebody mentions drinks on Friday.
Nobody asks the two questions that would take about ninety seconds.
What did we actually deliver.
And does it work.
Pyrite
Fool’s gold is a real mineral. Iron pyrite. It turns up in the same rock as the real thing, it has the same brassy yellow shine, and in a stream bed in decent light it is convincing enough that people have filled carts with it and gone home happy.
The test is embarrassingly simple. Gold is soft and extremely heavy. Pyrite is hard and comparatively light. Scratch it across a rough surface, and gold leaves a yellow streak while pyrite leaves a greenish black one. Hit it with a hammer, and gold flattens while pyrite shatters.
Two minutes, and no equipment worth mentioning.
The men who went broke on pyrite were not stupid, and most of them were not swindled either. They simply never ran the test, because the thing in their hand already looked like what they had come for.
On time and on budget is the shine.
It is not nothing. Gold is shiny too, and a project that lands its date and its number has done something real. The trouble is that shine is the one property the counterfeit shares completely.
The Two that Nobody Audits
A project has four things that can move. Time, cost, scope, and quality.
Two of them are measured in public. The date is in the plan, and everybody can see it. The cost is in the ledger, and Finance reconciles it monthly. Miss either one and you will be explaining yourself at the next meeting.
The other two are not measured in public at all.
Scope moves quietly. Three requirements go to phase two in April. Two more become enhancements in June. The interface nobody had time for is now a manual process that somebody will automate later. Every one of those was a sensible local decision, and not one of them required an announcement.
Quality moves even more quietly. The test window gets compressed because the build was late. Twenty medium defects go live as known issues with workarounds. The performance work is deferred until after go-live, which is a sentence that means it will not happen.
So when the date and the number are under pressure, everybody already knows which two will absorb it. Not because anybody is dishonest. Because two of the four are audited and two are not, and pressure runs downhill towards whatever nobody has to report.
Which is why the closure slide should carry four numbers rather than two.
Baseline date against actual date. Baseline cost against actual cost. Scope promised against scope delivered, with the deferred items listed by name rather than summarised as a percentage. And defects open at go-live, by severity, with the workarounds stated.
Add one line underneath saying who decided each trade-off and when. That single line is the difference between a managed decision and a quiet cut, and it costs nothing to produce because the decisions were all made by somebody, at some point, in a meeting.
The Wrong Lesson
Here is what the slogan really costs, and it is not the project on the slide.
A project that overruns its first date by two months, gets re-baselined openly with a decision behind it, delivers everything that was promised, and works on the Monday morning, goes into the corporate memory as a troubled project. The project manager gets asked what went wrong.
A project that hit both numbers by quietly removing a third of the scope and shipping forty known defects goes into the corporate memory as a success. The project manager gets the next one.
The organization has just learned something, and it has learned the wrong thing. It will apply that lesson for years.
Nobody sold the prospector his pyrite. He dug it out himself, carried it home, and was delighted with it the whole way.
Two minutes with a scratch plate would have told him.
Two questions would tell you.