It's hard to be on critical path especially if you are shy and don't want "management help." The Prince Machiavelli method (or PM method for short) of dealing with program schedule problems can be of great help. There are several ways to get off the radar screen:
1. Blame the delay on those who are used to being always late and have become impervious to "management help." Managers assume the perpetually late are late again. When given a fix date three years after the program is scheduled for completion, all sorts of futile, distracting management meetings are scheduled where enough progress is promised to lead managers on to believe they are making progress but not enough make a real difference. This is what I call the fabulous approach or Fab approach for short.
2. Create mountains of data and a Power Point presentation showing that the problem lies in another organization. The mountains of data don't need to show anything because no one has time to look at other's engineers data. The beauty of this approach is the only way the other organization can refute the Power Point presentation is to generate a bigger pile of data which takes time and would put the other organization on critical path especially if it had to create data and then solve the problem. The other organization will be better off to assign engineers to solve your problem in their part of the system. I call this the approach the MYL approach since by the time the other organization would be able to prove their innocence, it would be Many Years Later.
3. Call into question the goals that resulted in the critical path situation. In this case, you call the marketing requirements in question a "corner case" and ask Marketing to put together a thoughtful report documenting their request. One doesn't get into Marketing by putting together thoughtful Word documents. Most marketing experts think Microsoft Word is a dictionary application. So the Marketing experts will cave rather than do market research AND learn a weird new program. I call this the "we Just do Presentations" approach or the JP approach for short.
4. Blame the problem on an acute shortage of qualified engineers or chemists and constantly changing program goals. Offer to start recruiting new people who will show up is 6 months or ask for the best people on other programs. If this is successful, you won't be asked to recruit and the other managers won't be willing to gut their programs to help you. That means you will be asked to choose the deliverables you can meet whenever you get around to it. The side benefit is it allows everyone to avoid meetings they don't want to attend. In the case of chemists, that's any meeting where food isn't served. This is called the "busines as usual" approach.
5. There is a last approach which has the same ethical basis of dynamiting a lake to catch fish. It works so well, one feels guilty using it. This approach involves adding animation to Power Point presentations that seem to add to the technical understanding of managers but in fact deflects their attention from the schedule problem and the reasons for it. Done well, this approach avoids finger pointing at the animator and could lead to a cash bonus. This is called the "managers like Everything that Moves" approach or EM approach.
Those who invented these approaches did so with harmless intent, but lower minds were able to see potential the inventors missed.
