Sean’s “Holy Crap!!” Rule

This is an interesting idea that Sean mentioned in one of our offsite cross functional meetings. Someone was presenting an estimate and a plan to achieve a certain milestone. All of us in the room were debating on how that was too much of work to be completed in too short a time. Sean, who was sitting across in the room, then mentioned these words which immediately struck a chord with everyone. He said, “This is a Holy Crap estimate. Many times after doing an estimate when you sit back and look at the number you feel Holy crap this cannot be true!”. All of us were laughing and then I thought this is so true. We are often faced with a situation where we know that the scope and timeline are at loggerheads. Yet we go through the motions and try to squeeze the numbers and dates by making some ridiculous assumptions. All of that just to arrive at what we think is a palatable plan. If you look at it from the outside, your reaction is going to be same. Holy crap, that is impossible. I think many managers figure this out but do not have the courage to call a spade a spade. Then what follows is a predictable disaster, if the project gets approved.

Some other variations of this rule that I have heard are

• “What is he smoking?”
• “Is he nuts?”
• “You can’t use nine ladies to produce a baby in one month.” and finally one very peculiar one that I heard recently
• “You guys are stitching together lot of parts and calling it an elephant. That ain’t going to fly.”

No matter what you call it, I think rule deserves a prominent place in every leader’s memory so that he can put the hypothesis to some reality check. It will save a lot of projects from getting started with very ambitious (read unachievable) plans.