Respect & Success

I guess it was not so much another tough week of work - which is a constant factor anyway in the restructuring, M&A business - but it’s much more the fact that this week has gone underneath my skin, and I deeply felt sorry for the scene that some top level management was trying to “manage”.

It was once again one of those tight-deadlines, everybody-working-their-buds-off type of project, implementation of some new, yet standard piece of software. As the software development partner already previously hasn’t shown great understanding nor respect of us as customers, nor proven any sense of business partnership approach, has regularly missed deadlines and constantly kept arguing against our requirements and inquiries, I had a feeling that also this upcoming project would go down the drain.

Management - against my advice - thought that, since it’s such a simple piece to implement and only 6 workers would be involved in the new process and technology - we wouldn’t have to start testing a few days prior to go live but one to a max of 1.5 days would be more than enough.

hmmm, and there we went…Tuesday came, nothing set in stone, Wednesday came, again no signs of some more activity and software testing, Wednesday evening came and suddenly the ball started rolling. Doubts rose that the software partner might not have done his job, Thursday came and we asked the software engineer to come on site. By Thursday evening it was clear that neither they had done their job, nor had the internal staff been well prepared. By Friday morning, it was nothing but a stressful case. The workers didn’t know what was going on, management was trying to save their project but realized that they made a huge mistake, the software partner was the one who cared least (having been able to charge at least 2 days worth of consulting fees). The project was cancelled shortly after lunch-time on Friday. The (late) training/instruction session was cancelled at the minute, workers who pushed their week-end planning off till next week-end were left with neither new technology, nor any positive outlook for the next few weeks. All the energy they invested in the project during the past few weeks suddenly burst like a bubble.

There was nothing more painful and worse in the failure of this project than such lack of respect towards the workforce, towards a customer - both top management and business partner missed out on the most important value in business: the value of relationships up and down the ladder, the value of respect, the value of the contribution people make either physically or emotionally.

Next time you pick up a project, make sure you remember those points - you’ll see your project succeed and happy faces move on if you hold on to the very basic values you probably already honored as a child in your family.