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Project Post-Partum

9 August, 2008 (10:50) | General

General Patton, I am told, was an avid reader of battle history. One of his favorites was the German General Carl von Clausewitz who had lived a hundred years earlier.

Clausewitz is the originator of the famous quote ” No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy”. Similarly I find myself today looking over a 3 month project for a very prominent customer and marveling at the similarities between some software development efforts and battles. Of course software usually isn’t built under life threatening circumstances - no matter what some developers might claim …..

The interesting aspect of this particular project is the fact that we created a plan that all parties agreed to and all parties bought into. However, as the plan began to suffer the impact of “contact with the enemy” different participants ended up changing their mind very quickly about the aspects of the project that were highest priority.

At the outset it was understood that budget was the highest priority item. Our customers made it very very clear that a certain number of man hours were allocated to this work and nothing more. Since cost was the driving factor, the project was structured in a manner that accommodates this priority. Namely we had one primary developer and a couple of supporting people. The critical path rested in the ability of this one primary developer. The schedule was built around that effort and all seemed in order. There was even enough leeway to deal with the usual vagaries in a longer term dev cycle.

As I mentioned we ran into the usual set of issues along the way, nothing too extraordinary. But it did cause us to lose some calendar time, even exceeding my built-in allowance for this sort of thing.

To complicate matters, in the latter third of the cycle our customer insisted on some changes that ended up putting our developer behind schedule even more. At that point lo and behold the client began to view the schedule and final deadlines as the highest priority. Of course its easy to picture how this change of priorities ended up causing us some stress. One of my lessons learned for the future is the need to manage the customers expectations and priorities better. By clearly addressing the potential of this circumstance at the outset of the next similar project I hope we can alleviate some of the stress such situations may cost.

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