Bad News is not as good as good news.

It is news nonetheless and not all bad news is truly bad news.

Sometimes it’s an update – “we’re late on feature X because people have been away, this sprint we’re going to pour some people on in an attempt to catch up.”

It’s bad, not good.

But Bad News is never as bad as Ugly News.

“We were late on Feature X, we didn’t want to tell you. We let it sit for too long and now throwing more people at it isn’t going to fix the problem, it’s just going to slow things down.”

That’s Ugly News, that’s news that is much harder to recover from.

Delivering Bad News is part of being a good project manager, it has to get delivered, at some point in the project and the objective is always to grow and get better from it.

Ugly News is a trainwreck.

Deliver the Bad, avoid the Ugly.

Want more? Check out my book Code Your Way Up – available as an eBook or Paperback on Amazon (CAN and US).  I’m also the co-host of the Remotely Prepared podcast.

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