Failure

Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.

It was a regular working day. We received an invitation for an Ad Hoc meeting. We were asked to assemble in the conference room. We heard from one of the colleagues that the customer had raised a concern which our management was considering to be an escalation.

We gathered in the conference room. Our manager looked worried, "this morning we have received an email from the client. They are worried that the pace of project is not what they had expected. According to them the progress is really slow. Moving at snail's speed is what they mentioned in the email. I wanted all of you to know that this is definitely not good for the project. I know all of you have been working hard but it is not enough. I particularly want to check with Asha." He paused and the attention was focused on my colleague Asha.

Asha looked scared and embarrassed. It looked like she had known what was coming next. He looked at Asha and asked her, "Asha you definitely need to speed up. Your work has been really slow. It had also been erroneous. You need to pull up your socks. Senior team member like you made to perform better". This was not only embarrassing for Asha but for all of us. Asha had been struggling with health concerns in her immediate family. Everyone knew about her struggle including our manager. She had to be out of the work for one week to focus on her family. During this week she was not able to work and hence her backlog had increased. She was worried hence the quality was getting affected. All of us had been trying to help her however it was not enough.

A few days later the client had asked the management to let go off Asha from our team. The management had not informed anything about Asha's family emergency situation to the client and hence client was furious. Rather we heard that the management had made Asha a scapegoat and sacrificed her to keep the project.

During this time they had completely forgotten that Asha was the star player of our team. Asha had provided the best quality and output for last 5 years consecutively. When Asha was performing excellently that time everybody was praising how well our project had been doing. And now that she was not able to give time to the project because of her personal issues she became the easy target. Considering the quality and the output Asha was the lowest performer in our team and hence the failure was considered to be because of her. Being the bottom most performer she was asked to leave the project.

This is the sad reality of the corporate. Each success is celebrated as the projects success. But when there is a failure then the game of blame begins. They want to hand out the failure to one person and they are not willing to accept it as a projects failure. That told me that how the idiom that we had learnt in the school was correct.