In the article, the management team had already failed to do their jobs.
They had already failed to notice (or ignored) obvious problems, and the company clearly had a culture that discouraged raising or acknowledging such issues.
They also had failed to work with the client to establish a complete set of requirements - 9 months before the end of a multi-year project.
> It was not viable. Unacceptable.
The option that they suggested, letting the project slip, was a significantly more viable option than what they actually took.
Re-evaluating the requirements and coming up with a viable subset of deliverables would also have been a sane choice.
But since the company had no intention of letting the client know they were having trouble, sane solutions were banned from the table.
And it is cinsiderably harder to be actually helpful.
While everything you said is true, we and the author do not know what was previously discussed with the client. We don't know what was promised by either party, we don't know what the client messed up
Heck, I attended meetings with partners/clients that were simply impossible to get an output from, since the expectations in general were on completely different sides of the book.
But you air this out, realize that everyone agrees, most people resignate, and really helpful is this one guy, that offers to invest effort and time to work closely with a well chosen peer from the other side to get them on your side and finally work on the interesting things.
It's easier to be wrong.
In the article, the management team had already failed to do their jobs.
They had already failed to notice (or ignored) obvious problems, and the company clearly had a culture that discouraged raising or acknowledging such issues.
They also had failed to work with the client to establish a complete set of requirements - 9 months before the end of a multi-year project.
> It was not viable. Unacceptable.
The option that they suggested, letting the project slip, was a significantly more viable option than what they actually took.
Re-evaluating the requirements and coming up with a viable subset of deliverables would also have been a sane choice.
But since the company had no intention of letting the client know they were having trouble, sane solutions were banned from the table.