A while back (I won’t say how far back, or where) I had a “feeder project” (to maybe a lot of good billable work) where discovery was going OK nicely. Workshops happening, long, detailed emails from the person leading it. Every signal I could see said “working”. I read the emails …and having explained that anything that needed actual action, must be in the opening and flagged as such, thought that is fine (no need to read page 2 onwards).

Two things were actually going on.

Firstly, a checklist of “what we need for discovery” was being worked through. All of it. Including items that were blindingly redundant for this particular client …but they were on the list, so they got done, and billed.

Second, for a decent stretch there was no system access. No access, no progress. Nobody said “I’m blocked, this may cost us time”. The days went on the timesheet anyway.

Here’s the uncomfortable bit. If you asked them, they would say they did tell me. And they’d be right! It was in there, somewhere in those long emails, buried in the middle of hundreds of words about everything else. There was no sentence I would ever have recognised as an escalation …but the information existed, and it reached my inbox. The sign was up. I walked straight past it.

What I’d done, without ever thinking about it, was make “raise problems in a form Chris recognises” a requirement of the job. It’s so obvious that nobody ever writes it down, and I was relying on it without knowing I was relying on it (to be fair, I had asked but ….). I know transmitting is not enough, it has to be heard and, critically, processed in the way you intended; I had forgotten the reverse is true also (and asking/telling people how to actually get my attention doesn’t work for various reasons!).

I caught it, too late. We recovered some of it with the client, frankly not all (because their entirely reasonable PM, pointed out entirely reasonably I should have flagged it earlier ..yeah, good point, well made!)

So what do I do differently now? Not “read every email properly”. That doesn’t scale, and I’d fail again. I have my magic AI friend …to scan through what I think of as “the boring cr*p” and look for nuggets and gotchas, buried by accident (or, being frank, on purpose)

They did tell me. I just wasn’t listening …properly, AI backstops me now!