October 19th, 2006
Five Signs of a Doomed Project
Dare Obasanjo, blogger, Microsoft employee, and son of the president of Nigeria (seriously), has assembled a list of five signals that indicate a project may fail:
After being at Microsoft for five years, I’ve now begun to see the signs that a project is likely to crash and burn early on. Below is a top five list of signs your software project is in trouble…:
- Schedule Chicken: This is typically a sign that the project’s schedules are unrealistic.
- Scope Creep. When things get bad is when the goals of a project are changed or increased significantly without a corresponding significant change to the expected timeframe for delivery.
- Underresourced: You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. So you shouldn’t expect that 3 developers and $50,000 will be able to compete with the Googles and Microsofts of the world.
- Second System Syndrome: Once you ship a software application, it instantly becomes legacy code.
- No Entrance Strategy: How do you get people to use the application?
Dare’s list is home-grown, but does correspond to the issues we often discuss here on the project failures blog. He’s got a nice writing style as well, so check it out.
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Michael Krigsman is CEO of Asuret, Inc., a software and consulting company dedicated to reducing software implementation failures. Click here to discuss this post with him on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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