One of my favorite Bloggers is Shim Maron. His latest post is about Discussions Worth Having. There he talks about topics I have interest in as well.
- In a failed project, there is no one to blame except the project manager.
Projects have a vast variety of styles, complexities, and externalities. To say the PM is the root cause of project failure ignores these. Certainty the PM is a key contributor. But research shows most project failures start with a poor understanding of what done looks like. This leads to improper requirements, missing risks, poor planning, and resulting delays and cost overruns.
But the PM many times has limited control over the externalities of the project's environment. This includes customers, the market place, emerging technologies, funding sources, and the like. Certainly the PM can attempt to manage these, but controlling them is many times beyond the reach of the PM.
- No Estimates are needed for agile software development efforts.
The key flaw in the #NoEstimates concept is knowledge needed of cost of the project's outcome in determining its value. Value includes benefits and cost. This is a fundamental axiom of all business management process. The #NoEstimates approach appears to ignore this and puts the burden back on the buyer to define what something is worth in the absence of what it costs.
Without knowing what something costs, it is not possible to associate an economic value to the item being purchased or developed. Since the basis of all agile development processes is the creation of measurable value to the customer, knowing the cost of that value is mandatory. If I tell you the features you're considering for addition to your ERP system will produce a savings of $0.07 a transaction for the several million transactions per month, you cannot make a decision about that feature until you know what it will cost to implement.
There is a naive notion that the person requesting the feature should say how much money they have to spend and the developers can say how many features that can produce. But that just inverts the question of "how much" and "when."
I'd state that #NoEstimates is a non-starter in any domain where you are spending other peoples money and that money is governed by some framework that accounts for how the money is spent.
- What is the main reasons projects fail?
This is simple - there is no agreed upon description of what done look like in units of measure meaningful to the decision makers.
Without this, all the other project principles, practices, and processes have no basis on which to work.
Here's my take on how to avoid the root causes of project failure once the political, funding, and externalities have been address. Performance-Based Project Management
