As a test manager, almost every decision you have to make faces serious consequences.

Take for example my current project at customer X. Customer X has 3 different environments: ITT (voor system/developer tests), UAT (voor system integration and user acceptance tests) and PROD (the production environment).
To deploy an a different environment, certain quality gates should be taken into account.

To make life easier, customer X has also 2 departments with different release cycles. Project AA has planned for the October 2009 release. Project AB could only be released afterwards, and was planned for the March 2010 release. So was project PP, for which everyone guaranteed that the impact of projects AA and AB was will.

As you might have guessed, project AA did not make it into PROD in October. Nor did it in November. A special release slot was created in January, to prevent project AB not to make the March release.

January came, and tests for project AA were still ongoing. No escalation mails were send to the teams of project AB, PP, or any other project.

When tests for the March release started, it became clear that project AA blocked not only project AB, but also project PP and a bunch of other projects.

As test manager, you then have 2 main tasks: escalate the issue and try to find and formulate a solution. ASAP!

But what are the options in that case?

• If we wait for a solution for project AA, we lose precious testing time for project AB and PP.
• If we remove project AA from the release, project AB can not go into production. There is however, a legal obligation to launch this project.
• If we adapt the code of project PP and other projects, the issue seems solved. However, the analysis, development and testing work is not foreseen.

There's no golden solution here. As test manager, you can only try to keep your teams motivated, no matter which solution will be implemented.
What would you give as advice?