Be Frank, Brutally

I am tired of the hectic schedules and tense meetings. I think this is the price I should pay for being a Manager. But in retrospection, I believe I could have done some tasks differently that could have eased my tension.

The mistakes I did were trying to please the clients and not being frank. These two could get as deadly as we could ever imagine. I saw the face of this costly mistake as close as I will ever be. Both these mistakes are correlated. I was not frank so that I could please the clients.

I hid some bugs found at a very later stage. In the process of fixing it, we stepped on to plethora of other bugs and I was answerless when clients started asking me when they can start integrating. My blood pressure was jumping like tsunami waves as it will when I encounter pretty girls at Forum. I know this tension could have been avoided just by being Frank.

Being Frank is relatively easy when compared to being brutally frank. You should have guts to say to the clients on the production day that you have some serious bugs. You should be as gutsy as Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction if you have to say ‘we just have 75 bugs to be resolved and I am pretty confident that our boys won’t be able to do it by the D-day’. You could be ultra cool by patting your client’s shoulder – “Be cool Dude! This is how production works!!”

I have seen some projects that have been managed pretty well. Their status reports are brutally frank and they follow the principle that any bad news could only become worse by not informing.

So, don’t try to please the clients … Don’t ever do that by hiding your mistakes …