Shyness and the IT Professional

On our project, this week, we reached a major milestone. Today, our first major deliverables were scheduled to be completed, but yesterday, things didn't look very promising at all. The developers couldn't (or wouldn't) show us a demo, and couldn't provide my BA team with testing materials, and wouldn't meet with us to review our test plans. The Project Manager (PM) and I could do nothing but hope this was a case of "Hero Syndrome" where developers hold out delivery to rake in the glory when they do deliver on the deadline.

Thankfully, they did deliver, but nonetheless a few gray hairs were also achieved. This story repeats with nearly every project I've ever been privileged to be a part of. So what is really happening?

In this particular case, we discovered that the customer was working directly with the developer, so what we saw today had some very distinct differences from what the BA had documented as being needed. The BA was instructed NOT to "distract" the developer and could only attend meetings to extract what she needed from those. 

The result, we have a web site without any idea where the data is sourced, unsanctioned and simply not entirely what was approved. And in order to set it back on course, all documentation has to be reworked, setting us up to be behind schedule for the next iteration.  We realized this week, that the development team and the customer had never worked with BAs before, so they didn't understand our role, and they unknowingly introduced complications to the project. 

I've dramatized this more than necessary and it's nothing new to most, but I have to wonder, too, if some of the problem is shyness, too. Our developers and the customer sit within a few office cubes of each other, so the customer was constantly dropping by and "checking in" on his web site, while the BA sat 2 floors away and asks a lot of questions of both the customer and the developers. With a looming deadline coming up fast, they thought they could expedite the process by working directly with each other, when the BA had captured a lot more information about the company's requirements, which are not presently delivered.

Some of the smartest people in the world suffer from varying degrees of Social Anxiety Disorder. In a world where we value extroversion over introversion, this creates a culture where shyness is undervalued. I would hope that if we truly embraced our SAD-inclined developers more, that BAs might have had more opportunity to curb this diversion and made more progress. C'est la vie!