‘Six patting’ is a famous Chinese software development management story.
Patting 1: Under the increased competitive pressure, a project manager wins a big contract by patting his head – giving a very aggressive estimation, both from schedule and cost perspective.
Patting 2: The project manager’s boss heard the good news, talks to the project manager with patting his shoulder, “Well done! You will have a bright future…”
Patting 3: The project manager pats his chest vouch for the success of the project, “I will make sure it’s a successful project…”
Patting 4: The project is running on a rough road. The boss gets a lot of complaint from client, sometimes even in a very rude way. Every time, the boss shouts at the project manager with pounding [1] table.
Patting 5: The project can’t be delivered on time and gets delayed again and again. Once, when the boss shouts at the project manager again, the project manager pats his butt and leaves the company.
Patting 6: The boss swats[1] his thigh with regrets, “how did I hire such a stupid guy…”
[1] – In Chinese, these 6 actions are using the same verb – “拍”.
This story is of course a little hyperbole. I don’t see any project’s estimation are completely done by patting one person’s head now. But I want to extend a little, for a multi-shoring project, involving offshore teams into estimation is the only mitigation activity to avoid the result of “Six Patting”.
BTW, if you are interested in this story and you can read Chinese, you can see more articles/discussions on this story – just search from Google with the keywords “项目管理 六拍”. 🙂
