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Problem

Here's this week's situation:

My manager and his peer on the sales team have a nasty habit of making commitments to important customers, or our VP, without real discussion with the people who do the work. We've complained before, they pay lip service, and the next time there is pressure or a big opportunity they do it again. In some cases, the CEO steps up to be the cop between sales and the development team, but the CEO is effectively our lead salesman, and always favors in that direction.

The icing on this cake of misery is often we, the development team, after being forced into schedules we think are ridiculous, are blamed when we miss our dates.

What methods have people used to control over-commitment? Equally useful, what have you tried but hasn't worked?

- Signed, burnt out on bad schedules

Solutions

Name names in the risk communication.  Something like:

******

Log item 1 - Project ABC is starting 13 weeks behind schedule for the
October release.  John Püferbrains attended meeting with Suzie
Holysmokes and pre-committed to delivery without input from the
assigned development teams.  Teams are 40% confident they can make
October if all scope must be delivered.  Team is 95% confident they
can deliver 3 major application interfaces in October, the remaining
application interfaces in February, and the user interface in April.
This approach has been rejected by John and Suzie because Frank Iamceo
"considers this project a priority."

******

These kinds of decisions get distributed to the key stakeholders -
leaders, sponsors, etc.  Make the communication very plain and don't
hide behind flowery verbiage.  Just state the facts, and the only
reason for Mr. Püferbrains to get upset is because he knows he made an
impossible decision to impress someone with the hope of blaming others
for failure.

Do this enough, and the folks-who-must-be-impressed will see the
common thread in all these risks.  I have done this many times, and
I'm still here!

_________________________
Linda Whitesell, PMP
Senior Program Manager
AT&T Online Services PMO

So, as I see it, there are three areas of response so far:
1. Personal Management: quit, counter-propose or manage to your own plan
2. Manage the Committer: prioritized list of commitments, impact statements,
manage around the committer, embarrass the committer, involve the committer
in the planning process, learn to say "no".
3. Manage to team: fire them all, only hire heavy hitters, manage the
environment

The personal management points apply regardless of the situation in that
quitting and doing your own thing are always options. Given that the
original situation indicates that blame is attached to missed commitments,
I'm not convinced that doing your own thing is a winning strategy.

The original post also indicated that steps had been taken to control the
over-committer's actions but that they had failed.  Managing the
over-committer is fine if you can, in fact, influence their behavior. I call
this the 'Jean-Luc Picard management syndrome' in that they often believe
that, given enough management pressure, you can just 'make is so'. Alas, I
cannot yet bend the laws of space-time to fit unrealistic commitments.
Managing around (i.e. negotiating directly with the customer) can be a very
dangerous practice in my experience since you may be seen as lessening the
over-committer/client relationship, the same may be true to embarrassing
them. 

I will say I like the "just say 'no'" approach providing that you have
sufficient experience to be able to say "but I can say 'yes' to this' and
that you have sufficient management support to be able to say 'no',
although, in my experience in these situations, you are not given anything
like enough time to determine what you are comfortable saying 'yes' to.

Firing the team was, I suspect, somewhat tongue in cheek. What if the
over-committer has been making these commitments *because* he has a team of
22-100x-ers? Do commitments become less silly simply because there is an
expectation of exceptional performance? The Apollo 13 ground crew may have
solved the problem with a super-human effort in a one-time scenario but I
can't help but wonder whether they would continue to perform if the
requirement to over-achieve became a weekly occurrence.

This situation is difficult because it involves so many elements of the
company: revenue and sales, corporate image, internal morale,
inter-departmental relationships, employee satisfaction and more. For this
reason, communication has got to be the key but I don't know of a 'one size
fits all' solution.

-david-