Our Project is a @#$'ing Goat Rodeo

A Goat Rodeo is situation that is hopelessly !@#$'ed up.

There are three stages of goat-ness.

First is the Goat Rope. Second is the utilitarian Goat !@#$. This second stage normally requires a serious amount of work to un-!@#$.

Lastly, there is the Goat Rodeo and is the worst of the three, it is beyond even profanity. It describes a situation that involves many individuals screw ups, and implies that the !@#$ up is already well underway, meaning that there is no hope in stopping the mess. Usually said with a defeated tone: Ready to go to this Goat Rodeo? Its gonna be terrible.

To put your Goat Rodeo back on track,

1. Stop – halt the work activities and assign a team to start the triage.
2. Assign An Evaluator – recruit and external professional to lead the triage process.
3. Evaluate The Project Status – to establish the true and unvarnished facts.
4. Evaluate The Team – to identify problems that may have contributed to the current state.
5. Define The Minimum Goals – that will reduce the project to the smallest size to achieve only the essential goals.
6. Determine Of The Minimum Goals Can Be Met – analyze the feasibility of the minimum goals and determine if they can reasonably be achieved.
7. Rebuild The Team – based on the recovery goals, rebuild a competent team that can execute the project using the approved processes.
8. Perform A Risk Assessment – with the new goals and the rebuilt team, identify process and personnel risk and provide corrective actions.
9. Revise The Plan – produce a new IMS, BOE, and Risk Management Plan that includes the corrective action from the previous approach.
10. Install An Early Warning System – put a system in place to ensure the project does not slip back into its old ways.

When programs get in trouble, direct intervention is needed to get back to GREEN. Getting back to GREEN starts with an assessment of the program and the firm’s commitment to perform and its ability to perform. With these commitments and abilities, the Root Cause of the non-performance must be identified in order to define the corrective actions. A Root Cause Analysis (RCA) reveals the sources that require corrective actions. With the corrective action plan in place, the PMB is then reconstructed. These ten (10) steps are from Catastrophe Disentanglement: Getting Software Projects Back on Track are needed to recover a project from RED and put it back on course the GREEN.