Richard Darby

I have many times been through the theory of great project management but Richard Darby is the first time I saw it put into practice.

In a university business class one of our main topics was project management. Specific focus was put on Gantt charts and critical paths. Fast forward several years and I was promoted to VP Technology where one of my immediate responsibilities was overseeing our departments responsibilities in an ongoing corporate project to move to a level 1 PCI process. This is an arduous process of migrating many processes within an organization to adhere to the most stringent payment industry standards.

Needless to say it was incredibly complex and fraught with many unknown pitfalls if you hadn’t been through this process before. Guiding me through this rather challenging process was Richard. I remember thinking early on how calm and organized Richard was. This was a multi-year, inter-departmental, multi-million dollar project with critical deadlines and third party audits looming. Richard would meet with key stakeholders in our department and calmly walk though the meticulously laid out project plan in Gantt chart format.

These meetings would often cause stress as inevitably it would come my turn to update on where our tasks were at and I had to be held accountable if deadlines were missed, which they frequently were. Richard would then calmly ask for my re-estimate and I would watch as the timeline re-balanced and we saw where the project deliverables netted out. Whether our department was part of the critical timeline or not was always the bottom line.

I learned several key things in those meetings.

One, everyone misses estimates. The important thing is to learn from your underestimation and improve your accuracy. I could write an entire book on estimation in software but Richard’s process held us accountable which made estimation accuracy an important skill.

Two, come prepared with you revised plan. OK, so you screwed up. How are you going to fix it or do you have a realistic timeline revision? Other people can be counting on you. Don’t give a date you know you can’t hit or you will disappoint again and loose trust.

Three, be aware of the critical path. If there is a deadline, track back to what is required to meet it and what are the tasks that cannot be missed. If they push past the deadline you need to seriously revise your plan. Less features, new deadline? Know well before you get there.

Four, keep checking in. Richard would meet with us regularly to ensure the critical path was checked against.

Finally, keep calm. In the beginning I expected frustration or even anger with missed deadlines. Richard had clearly been through this process before, had seen the slips and mistakes and other projects affecting the outcome. He wasn’t fazed and merely assessed the plan and knew where we needed to make changes.

I greatly enjoyed working with Richard. He exuded calm confidence overseeing an incredibly complex systems migration process. I take the lessons and his example with me in every new endeavour. It’s why he’s on My52.

LinkedIn: /richardjdarby