Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Get It Right the Last Time: Developing an Agile Attitude
Doug is the author of the landmark book, Extreme Project Management®: Using Leadership, Principles and Tools to Deliver Value in the Face of Volatility. He works with clients who undertake projects in very demanding environments: those settings that feature high speed, high change, high unpredictability and high stress. Doug has lived in the trenches—from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to Beijing, China—with over 275 project teams with budgets that ranged from $25,000 to over $25 million. He is one of the founders of the Agile Leadership Network, an organization dedicated to connecting, developing and supporting great project leaders. He is known for his hard-hitting and humorous keynote speeches that address vital issues facing today’s project-based organizations. You can visit Doug at www.dougdecarlo.com.
I was brought up in the project management school of thought that preached, “Get it right the first time!” On the surface, it made a lot of sense. That way I wouldn’t find myself at the end of a project and discover that I had to do all or most of it over again. By then, any mistake would be very costly to fix or to re-do.
“Get it right the first time” makes good sense when the requirements are well known, if not fixed, and when the means for getting the job done are clear cut and proven.
However, the “get-it-right-the-first-time” philosophy is counter productive under circumstances where the final deliverable can not be known in advance with certainty, and more so when the means to achieving the end result are nebulous. Here you face the double whammy of an extreme project: Both the what (we are supposed to do) and the how (to get it done) are uncertain.
Under conditions of uncertainty, a project’s trajectory looks more like the unpredictable path of a heat-seeking missile attempting to catch up with a moving target.
A fundamental tenant of agile project management is this: You don’t manage the unknown the same way you manage the known. A different attitude is required under extreme conditions where uncertainty is a constant. Applying a “get-it-right-the-first time” attitude sets the project up for certain failure since by definition, the end result and the…
Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.
ADVERTISEMENTS
|
"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty." - George Bernard Shaw |