Your company wants to develop new software to help the sales team better manage the client’s incoming messages. As head of sales, you spend precious time with your sales team to write down all the specifications expected by the development team. Then the dev team returns to inform you that they can’t deliver on all the specifications. You’ll have to decide to give in either on the budget, the perimeter, or the deadline.

Which one do you choose?

Once the development starts, developers start questioning the relevancy of your specifications. According to them, they are some that are too complex to develop. As a consequence, they can’t develop the software with these specifications. It looks like they didn’t realize that before the start of the development… Oops 😀

Which one do you choose?

Few months after the beginning of the development, the sales team needs has evolved. However the dev team answers them that any modification of the specifications is not possible aftetr the start of the development. It has indeed impact on either the roadmap, the technical complexity of the project or the budget.

How could you cope with this situation as head of sales?

Around the end of the developments, the dev team leader realized that he missed a 300K€ budget line in his project follow-up. Oops! :-) Scared, he decided to hide it and downgrade the software to comply with the roadmap deadlines. After this comes the time of the demonstration of the software to the sales team.

How would you react to discovering the software?

Your project is experiencing difficulties, and one specific team member is what we call a “bottleneck,” meaning, he can no longer handle the workload. This creates a strong slowdown in the project. To amend that situation, what could you do as a project manager?