During my last two years of college, I worked as a co-op with IBM. My boss, a straightforward and serious individual, cut straight out of a bolt of IBM-blue cloth, used to tell those of us in his department “bad news does not get better with age.” It took a while for that advice to sink in, but I am a firm believer in that saying now.

To illustrate, back in the mid-1990s I was doing some project management and software engineering work for a telecom. A billing system team in another department discovered that there was a problem that was causing some of the bills in Louisiana to be miscalculated. They decided to sit on this information while they worked furiously to fix it. By the time they finally raised the red flag that there was a problem, however, they had under-billed by over ten million dollars. To compound this disaster, because they had waited to sound the alarm, they weren’t aware that they had missed the window where the FCC would allow them to even attempt to recoup most of those costs. If they had sounded the alarm earlier, the impact could have been mitigated, and jobs could have been saved. As it was, there was no shortage of heads that rolled.

Years later I had occasion to ask one of the team members why they had kept this a secret. She told me that no one wanted to be the one to bring the bad news to the CIO.

Ben Franklin once said that fish and houseguests begin to stink after three days. I would add “bad news” to that list. The sooner bad news is brought to the forefront, the sooner it can be addressed.

What are you doing to create a safe environment within your project for people to share the unvarnished truth?