coneblog

I’ve got a twelve foot tall chainsaw carving of a tiki head in my front yard, and it is for sale. There is a catch, however…

You have to buy the house. You see, we are selling the Cone family home, downsizing, and moving. It’s a great house – with Japanese garden, pool, 4 BR, tucked into a wooded cul de sac in a great school district in the heart of Philadelphia suburban Big Pharma country. Close to everything. But there is this 12 foot tiki head.

I carved the Tiki head a few years ago from the stump of a tree in the front yard that had to come down. It took all summer, but I’m quite pleased with the result. It is my first effort in the chainsaw medium, and it is a credible rendering of an Easter Island head.

It caused some controversy with our real estate broker, who wanted to insert in the listing that the head would be removed at the seller’s expense. But want does this have to do with Project Management?

I got to thinking about pride of authorship, perception, and left-over artifacts in relationship to some projects that I have known.

Do you recognize this scenario?

- A system component is created through serendipity, in that it was done opportunistically, and seemed like a good idea at the time;

- There is pride of authorship, in that the component is primarily the brainchild and baby of a senior executive;

- The component has become something of a monument, and joke;

- The component no longer has a clear use or value;

- The component is very visible to outsiders, but has faded into the background for the project team, and is rarely talked about.

If so, you may have a twelve foot tiki head in your project.

So what to do? Is it hurting the project, or taking up resources? Is it a distraction? Does its maintenance distort discussions of architecture or approach? Is it a subject of controversy? Do the Users no longer value it? If so, get out the chainsaw, and get rid of it in the next revision.

However, be careful. There are pitfalls. How do you get approval to apply resources to “fix” something that isn’t broken? How do you take a chainsaw to the brainchild of a well-placed executive? Maybe it is best to just let it be. If you can’t move it or remove it, just leave it for the next guy.

And that’s our approach in selling our house. We aren’t calling attention to the sculpture as a defect, but are positioning it as part of the personality of the house. Once the house is sold, the new owner can do anything he or she wants with the tiki head. For a few hundred dollars, someone can come and reduce it to a pile of seasoned oak firewood.

Will I be sad if that happens? Like many experiences in life, the great satisfaction was in the making of it. Plus, there was some good fun in dressing ‘tiki man” in his size 200 Santa Claus hat over the Holidays. So I’ll let the Tiki man go.