I have a business friend from Houston Texas, who has a great saying about projects, in his best Southern Louisiana accent.
You know you're in the ditch when the weeds are hitting the windshield. Get back on the road and keep the car between the two white lines.
We rarely have indicators for when we're headed for the ditch in the commercial world. Here's a list of indicators we'd find on our defense and space program.
These items include:
- The baseline is risk loaded but we don't have any Management Reserve.
- We have new coders on this project, but we're still following the processes we got our CMMI DEV V1.2 appraisal.
- We have unresolved KPP's in our Technical Performance Measures, but our program is GREEN.
- Detailed mitigation are floating around, but we have no allocated Management Reserve
- There are really no software risks on this software program
- Our Baseline is built on "risk," but it's not really a "house of sand."
- We never "confuse efforts with results."
- Our calculations for the EAC are not really risk based, they're our best estimate for what this thing will cost.
