Dirty Harry & feeling lucky

Tom Breur

2 March 2014

“If only …” How often have you heard phrases begin like that in post-mortems of products gone awry? They just didn’t get lucky (enough). Or so it seems.

Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) from the San Francisco Police Department doesn’t like to leave things to chance. He has learned the hard way that he isn’t always lucky.

Harry Callahan: I know what you're thinking, punk. You're thinking "did he fire six shots or only five?" Now to tell you the truth I forgot myself in all this excitement. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and will blow you head clean off, you've gotta ask yourself a question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?

As a consultant, when I need to answer the question whether a problem (like a project overrun) is due to lack of skill, or an attitude/culture problem, I often use the “gun” test.

Are people unable to perform, even at gun point? Or might they have resorted to some other approach? Would people still have taken all these chances, relied so much on luck, if their life had depended on it? If they had to guess whether Callahan had fired five or six rounds so far?

Are people fundamentally unable to change their destiny (adhere to a project schedule), or have ‘circumstances’ seduced them to an unrealistic plan? Management pressure, maybe? Peter Drucker has been quoted saying: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Teams under (schedule) pressure, often allow themselves to adopt unrealistic plans. Or rather: project schedules that rely on being lucky. Very lucky. Repeatedly. They later wind up saying: “If only…”

As DeMarco & Lister (2003) point out in “Waltzing with Bears”, it makes sense to invest in alternative solutions, even if you wind up ignoring them. Give yourself more than one way to succeed. Have a fallback scenario (which invariably comes at some cost) in case you get “unlucky.” As long as this allows you to meet the original schedule, the alternative might be less elegant, require extensive manual processing, etc.

These fallback scenarios are essentially options. You hope that they will expire, without ever getting used. But don’t consider them waste. They are your hope in scary times, and in fact that little bit of certainty allows to take prudent project risks.

Oftentimes, management is reluctant to “invest” in these alternative routes to success. This is when I love to pull out my Callahan quote: “Are you feeling lucky” Well, do ya, punk?”