8 Carelessness

Carelessness is not paying enough attention to the task at hand; not exact, accurate, or thorough. In project management, we must do everything we can to ensure that any after-the-fact review will not find a careless act we should have prevented.

The Sin

Carelessness covers a broad spectrum: from the carelessness of a child spilling a drink to the carelessness of a medical professional’s malpractice. Although project managers do not usually work in life or death arenas, companies have high standards and expect professionals to execute projects as though they have lives in their hands. These companies expect exact, accurate, and thorough performance from their project managers.

Carelessness is common in project management, but the vast majority of the time it is trivial and goes undetected. Consider another common experience: driving a car. How common is carelessness in driving? How often do you forget to use your turn signal to change lanes, not come to a complete stop at a stop sign, or exceed the speed limit even for a moment? Do you feel that because no accident or ticket results, no carelessness was involved? How many other drivers have you seen exhibiting carelessness?

In project management, it is the patterns we set day after day that will eventually result in a project’s success or failure: from the consistent carelessness of not capturing all the project requirements, to dismissively ignoring team member issues, to performing inadequate quality checks (see shoddy quality). Once a problem arises, it is easy to say that the problem couldn’t have been prevented. But if you truly evaluate the practices leading up to the problem, you will often find a pattern that seemed harmless yet created unnecessary difficulty.

As project managers, we need to focus on eliminating carelessness—even if it is unlikely to have dire consequences—and thereby prevent project management malpractice.

A Case of Carelessness

An example of carelessness I have seen too many times in IT projects is poor testing of software. This is often traceable back to the original requirements. The project team develops and executes test scripts, but the scripts do not always take into account the original requirements. The software will pass the testing phase and move to production, but then bugs that were not screened out during the testing will pop up.

The customer loses the expected opportunity to use the software, and the project team must spend time and money to correct the problem.

The problems of carelessness are usually realized in the project’s final stages. In this case, carelessness could have been addressed early in the planning phase of the project.

Tips for Combating Carelessness

Add and schedule tasks for developing appropriate testing while the requirements are being identified.

Ask about and record how each requirement could be tested during requirements gathering.

Exercise diligence by not assuming—but checking and confirming.