Came across a well composed list of software development "Classic Mistakes Enumerated," hat tip to the always interesting Deal Architect. Anyone who has spent any time at all in software development, system integration and implementation will recognize most of these mistakes. They happen to some degree on nearly every project. Reading through the list brought back some good memories of large implementations that I worked on as an Oracle consultant back in the day. As we got into the meat of the project it would become increasingly obvious that we had already made several if not all of the mistakes in the list above. The way out of the mud our tires were spinning in, according to the project manager, Frank, was to use the Project Plan to bludgeon team members, repeatedly and unmercifully, until we finally we got the bus moving again and back on dry road. The Project Plan was the instrument that delivered all manner of ridicule, embarrassment and cajoling. It wasn't Frank or the Program Office or the Executive Management that was bludgeoning us; no, it was simply the Project Plan, which we had all signed off on several months earlier before thousands of new requirements dropped on us. The end result was predictable. We all came to hate the words Project Plan, Work Breakdown Structure and Critical Path because to us all they meant was pain. They were being used as a crude instrument to force compliance with madness. (On one project they actually made us work 7 days a week for the entire summer because the head honcho had booted the single task that was asked of him, causing a 3 month delay) It was not until a year after that fiasco that I realized that a good project plan could be a great asset. Now I use them regularly to help organize what we are about in a NetSuite implementation, as a guide to who has what task and when. A good project plan is a big help and a great guide to success. The moral of the story is summed up by Tolstoy's first line in Anna Karenina: "All happy families are like one another, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." There's an infinite number of ways to screw things up and only one way to get them right. The project plan is not going to make you succeed, nor will the other ten million panaceas offered in project management books and articles. Good projects are led by good people who understand how to keep the wolves at bay and get good results from the team. It's not a miracle that some project teams succeed over and over again, or that others fail consistently. Respect, hard work, sense of humor, some flexibility and a little skin will bring home the prize. |
