“So, your team isn’t here this morning because you worked them until midnight last night. You burned all the profit in the project on overtime and expedited shipping,” I recapped.

“Yes, I think it is important to control burnout,” Roger replied. “When my team works on projects like that, I can tell they begin to grumble.”

“Why did it take such an extraordinary effort to work through that project?” I wanted to know.

“Oh, I could tell it was a tough project right from the start. The client didn’t really know what they wanted, so we had a lot of starts and stops, re-work and changes. I didn’t realize how many resources we were using until I looked at the budget.”

“You looked at the budget?” I sounded surprised.

“Well, yeah, when the project was about 90 percent complete, I wanted to see where we stood. It wasn’t pretty,” Roger explained. “The client was kind of designing the project as it went along. Unfortunately, we were on a flat fee for the contract.”

“What did you learn?” I asked.

“That it’s a lot more efficient to design things on paper, make changes on paper, re-design things on paper than it is to do it for real. I guess the project would have turned out better if there had been more planning.”
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