Shooting the Messenger Who Brings Bad News

by Ed Yourdon

You've heard the phrase; you know what it means. You agree that it's a bad idea, and so does your boss, as well as his or her boss. Yet the practice continues to flourish, especially in large organizations -- and particularly on large, complex, highly visible, mission- critical IT projects. And since it's easy to be lulled into a false sense of confidence in the early stages of an IT project, it's all the more difficult for project managers to accept bad news in the later stages of the project -- i.e., at a point when it's almost impossible to recover from the newly discovered problems and still deliver the project on time.