Estimated efforts don’t apply to someone who’s not on the project

I recently received a request from another team.  The other team is working on a project that needs to “go live” at the end of the month and the person who was originally planned to complete one of the features became unavailable.  I am always happy to help out and love to see teams collaborate… at the same time I am very pragmatic and realistic.

My offer was something like this:

I can get someone on my team to help out, but the only people with availability within this timeframe have limited to no experience with the technologies or client you are working with.  I want you to know that you will be taking on some risk.  You have estimated the effort without our involvement, and I cannot commit to having someone complete the effort in the estimated time.  Additionally, you will need to incur some overhead because this person does not have domain knowledge and they are not familiar with some of the technologies used.

The person that I was working with seemed to get perturbed and I think they thought that I was being unhelpful.  I told them that any overages due to the stated risks would need be incurred by that project.  I got the sense that they felt I was being unreasonable and that I should pay for the overhead due to new technologies with my training budget.  I disagreed.

After the meeting, I felt a sense of guilt, and wondered if I was somehow being unhelpful.  I thought about it some more and I’m sticking to my guns, I think I did the right thing.  In my opinion, too often people get themselves into trouble by not having difficult conversations like this one.

I think the best thing in this situation would be something along the lines of this:

Inform the customer that we have someone with availability to get this feature complete within their timeline, however they are new to the project and some of the technologies.  They have the core skill set and foundation to complete the work, but we need to understand the risk… this may cost more than originally estimated.  If they are uncomfortable with this, we have several options:

• Push the date back until the person originally planned to do the work becomes available
• We can pay for x number of hours of overage incurred to compensate them for this discomfort
• We can validate the estimate with the new person and provide them with an estimate that we can commit to

I think the worst thing to do is, not communicate the risk and cross your fingers.