Systems Technologies

Mistakes have the power to turn you into something better than you were before - Anonymous. The book ‘Rapid Development’ equipped me with the knowledge of common mistakes that could possibly lead to the failure of a project and the ways to avoid those mistakes in future projects. I identified few key mistakes related to people, process, product and technology fronts that took place in our recent project, when avoided can improve the success rate of the future projects.

1. Undermined motivation: Over the course of the project, employees were asked to work overtime even on weekends which undermined their morale. Study shows that this not only reduces the productivity of the employees but also impacts the quality of the work delivered.
2. Overly Optimistic Schedules: The executive committee while promising the customer regarding the delivery, didn’t take the estimates developed by the project manager into consideration which led to over optimistic schedules.  This developed intense pressure on the project development team by undermining the effective planning and abbreviating the activity timelines, contributing to the failure. This has also had a negative impact on the productivity of the team.
3. Feature Creep: An additional inventory interface was promised apart from cutting the timelines which further lengthened the software schedules and amplified the schedule pressure on the developers.
4. Silver Bullet Syndrome: Too much reliance on new tools like database query tool, C# - that the team had never worked on before contributed to one of the failures.
5. Overestimated savings from tools: Even though the new tools that were planned to be used, saved the time of developing, it was offset by the learning curves associated with them. So, the gains that were estimated were not truly realised, extending the schedules further. Also, new tools bring up new risks which required to be handled by an effective risk management system.

Learning from my past experience as I mentioned in the beginning of this letter, I would like to state what I think will help us avoid making these mistakes again in the future. According to my experience, the root cause for the delay in delivering the project on time was the ‘limited timeline’ provided to us for this project. In the future, we should have our top executive managers be directly in communication with the customer to find out the reasons behind their decision to speed-up the project. By understanding their real requirements and avoiding future creep, we can propose to them a more suitable solution which will be a win-win for both of us. We should present the customers the trade-off framework of time, cost, and quality. Moreover, we should include the concept of risk management during project planning process to avoid the wishful thinking and traps of rewarding the team. To do so would give us some buffer for any unexpected uncertainties that may arise along the way during the developmental phase. We should also revisit the plan regularly, add realistic milestones that give us visibility to monitor and track the project effectively. This initiative will give us better reaction time to any occurrences that are outside the scope of planning, such as to revise the deadline or to add more people and can help to keep up the morale and track the productivity of employees. The team selection process needs to be more robust, which could be achieved by: