Don't bother me with the details

I am increasingly alarmed at the number of people who are not willing to spend the time necessary to plan and run an effective project, program, or task.  I have just left a conference call where we were helping a client review the design of an application we are jointly developing.  During the call, as we attempted to raise issues and concerns about usability and access to data, the major sponsor shot down any questions around functionality that did not have to do with the main functional process, so many usability issues are being ignored or not even considered.

Given that my team has close to 50 years of software design and usability experience, you'd think that if we raised some questions about design, functionality and usability, we'd get the benefit of the doubt.  But anything we raise that does not immediately affect the core business process the software is meant to support, the comments are ignored.  The only thing I can attribute this to is willful ignorance.  What else can you ascribe to this behavior when you contract with an "expert" and then ignore his or her advice?

This is the new "don't bother me with the details" management style.  What it conveys is that the decision maker is far too busy to get involved or weigh in on what are actually very important decisions.  This stems from one of three perspectives:

1. I'm far too important to get involved in decisions at that level
2. I'm far too busy to spend time on this
3. I don't know what I want so I'll pretend to one of the other two perspectives

I actually believe that many of these interactions are a result of perspective 3 - the decision maker does not know what he or she wants, and wants to delay and discussion or decision to another time.  Rather than admit that they haven't thought it through, and worried about the pace and scope of development, they simply ignore the feedback or discount it.  Many times I've seen this happen, only to reconsider the topics at a later date.  The problem with that is that reconsidering costs more since the issue should have been addressed earlier.

If one of the first two perspectives are true, then the client needs to either assign someone else who can spend the time to make the decisions or find a project manager who is at the appropriate level to make the decisions.  Speed at the expense of accuracy is a fool's mission, and hiring an expert to do a job and ignoring their advice and input is lunacy.

Comments

[Herman Kopinga]

Hi Jeffrey,

Could there be a option number 4? Here the client thinks of their self as experienced with hiring contractors and they have developed a rule of thumb to work with this.

They ignore all advice at first and later in the process pick up on the issues that the expert still points out.

This way, I have noticed, they think they get the most important value the expert has to offer and don't get the delays involved with implementing all details.

I think this generalization of working with contractors is very dangerous since you only get median value from the best ones and still get nothing from the inexperienced ones.

Do you recognize this?