Dear Bob ...A Chicago DNA lab analyst's doubts about a man's guilt wasn't enough to move higher ranking authorities to get an FBI test for DNA (considered more reliable than the police lab's testing). Why not? Detectives already had a confession.The accused was convicted and spent 11 years in jail before being exonorated. Chicago has agreed to pay him $9 million for that wrongful conviction.The hierarchy didn't Dear Bob …A Chicago DNA lab analyst’s doubts about a man’s guilt wasn’t enough to move higher ranking authorities to get an FBI test for DNA (considered more reliable than the police lab’s testing). Why not? Detectives already had a confession.The accused was convicted and spent 11 years in jail before being exonorated. Chicago has agreed to pay him $9 million for that wrongful conviction. The hierarchy didn’t produce the desired result in this case, the correct outcome. How could the lab analyst have addressed the chain of command without violating the chain’s requirements?– Concerned citizenDear Concerned … The short answer is that there’s nothing the analyst could have done. Even moving into whistleblower-land would have been uncertain, with the certainty of a high cost.We’re in a society where for many prosecutors, and citizens, the goal is to convict someone … anyone … of the crime. In particular, it’s easy to understand how it might be that a prosecutor’s office would be prone to conflating the intermediate result of getting a conviction with the correct goal of getting the guilty party into jail.(When I was growing up in the Chicago area, it was well-known that when no suspect was in sight, more than a few detectives would happily grab someone they “knew” was a bad person, put him in a room, and hit him over the head with a phone book until he confessed to the crime. The result, from their perspective: One crime solved; one bad guy off the streets. What’s not to like?) How does my annoying social commentary apply to IT and the world of office politics? Quite directly, as there are no shortage of circumstances where businesses conflate intermediate results with true goals.One example among many is project management. Projects have objectives – the point of it all. They have goals – the business outcomes that lead to achieving the point of it all. And they have deliverables – their tangible work products. In most companies, project managers are responsible for completing all deliverables on time and within the original budget. Achieving the project’s goals is someone else’s problem, let alone achieving the actual objective.Say you’re a project manager and realize that the stated deliverables are insufficient for achieving the goals and objective. What’s your best course of action – recommending an increase in scope and commensurate increases in budget and staffing, or to keep your mouth shut and get the deliverables done? In most companies, that’s a purely rhetorical question.How should either proceed (the project manager and lab analyst)? In each case I’d say they had a responsibility to raise the issue with the responsible party – the business sponsor in the case of the PM; the lead investigator in the case of the lab analyst. From an organizational perspective, after that it’s someone else’s decision.From an ethical perspective you could make the case that the lab analyst should have contacted the accused party’s attorney. But that definitely violates the chain of command, and probably makes the lab analyst unemployable for, at a minimum, several decades. – Bob Technology Industry