The Contoso Convergence, Episode 7: The Steering Committee
An Advanced Dungeons & Dynamics 365 session. Episode 7 of 14.
Previously on: Episode 6, The Ghost in AP, the party found an eighteen month manual rebate accrual sitting in a suspense account, discovered the numbers didn’t match the actual contract terms, and learned that Oskar had inherited the whole mess without feeling senior enough to flag it.
Four weeks to go live, and the party finally has to answer to someone who isn’t in the war room every day. This episode is about the gap between what a project looks like from the inside and what it looks like from a slide.
The Session
GM: Four weeks out. Steering committee. The sponsor, a man named Feld who has opinions about PowerPoint, wants to see progress.
Feld: Just walk me through it. Order to cash. Should take ten minutes.
Marge: (under her breath, to the party) Golden path or real path?
Thorne: Real path. Every time. That’s the whole point of this engagement.
Marge: Feld, I can show you the happy path in ten minutes. I’d rather show you the actual order flow, exceptions included, because that’s what your team will live in. It’s twenty minutes. Worth it.
Feld: (checking his watch) Fine. Twenty.
Sable: (casting Data Mapping live, in front of the committee) Watch what happens when the order hits a partial shipment. This is the case that broke the second go live attempt.
The demo hits the exception. It resolves correctly, slower than a golden path demo, but correctly. Feld leans forward.
Feld: That’s the first time in this whole engagement someone showed me something breaking on purpose.
Ai. Cassiopeia: Sponsor confidence metric, trending upward for the first time since project kickoff.
Feld: (genuinely curious now) Show me another one.
Sable: This is the freight variance case. Multi leg shipment, split invoice, partial return. It’s ugly. Watch.
The second exception resolves too, a little slower, a little messier, but every number lands where it should. Feld sits back, arms crossed, but not defensively. He’s thinking.
Feld: In eighteen months, nobody has shown me a demo that wasn’t a straight line from order to cash. Every single one looked perfect. And every single one was wrong within a week of go live.
Marge: That’s usually the tell. If a demo never breaks, it’s not testing anything. It’s performing.
Feld stays for the full twenty minutes. Then he asks a question nobody expected.
Feld: If the demo can survive that, why isn’t the rebate mess fixed yet?
The demo that’s allowed to break
There’s a particular kind of silence that happens when a demo hits a real exception in front of a room full of decision makers, and then resolves it correctly anyway. It’s the sound of a sponsor recalibrating what they actually believe about a project. Not because the exception was impressive, but because it was honest, and honesty had apparently been in short supply for eighteen months.
Feld’s line is the whole point of this episode: every demo he’d seen before this one looked perfect, and every one of them broke within a week of go live. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not bad luck either. A demo that never shows an exception isn’t reassuring anyone. It’s teaching the sponsor to trust a version of the system that doesn’t exist. When reality inevitably shows up looking messier than the slide, the sponsor doesn’t think “well, exceptions happen.” They think “I was lied to,” because in a sense, they were, just not maliciously.
Marge’s rule from episode one finally pays off here: document the golden path, don’t perform it. It costs more time in the room. It’s a harder sell to a sponsor checking his watch. But it’s the only version of a demo that actually builds trust instead of borrowing it against a deadline that’s going to come due eventually, usually at the worst possible moment.
Feld’s response tells you everything about what eighteen months of golden path demos had cost this project. It wasn’t more confidence. It was less. He’d learned, correctly, not to trust what he was being shown, and it took one honest twenty minute demo to start reversing that.
What happens next
Feld’s question lands exactly where it should: if the team can handle a broken demo in front of a steering committee without flinching, why has the rebate accrual been sitting unresolved for eighteen months? The party doesn’t have a good answer yet, because the real answer goes back further than anyone in the room realizes, and it’s about to become Feld’s problem too.
Next episode: Episode 8, What Feld Knew (coming soon)
If your last steering committee demo didn’t show a single exception, that’s worth thinking about. Gamifying the Enterprise: Game Mechanics for Continuous Proficiency is available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GY3VWLVX
And if you’ve ever sat through a demo that only shows the golden path, you already know why this scene matters. It’s the entire premise behind Dog and Pony Autopsy, worth a read if this one landed.
If you want the configuration discipline behind demos that are actually allowed to break, start here: adnd365.com/start
A Tinkerers Notebook 