How to Make the Right Project Decisions

Ken Whitaker of Leading Software Maniacs (LSM) has more than 25 years of software development executive leadership and training experience in a variety of technology roles and industries. He has led commercial software teams at Software Publishing (remember Harvard Graphics?), Data General, embedded systems software companies, and enterprise software suppliers. Ken is an active PMI member, Project Management Professional (PMP) certified, and a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM). Sources for LSM's material come from case studies, personal leadership experience, the PMI Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) and Ken's leadership books: Managing Software Maniacs, Principles of Software Development Leadership and I'm Not God, I'm Just a Project Manager.

  Agile   CRM   Stakeholder Management  

Every software project, agile or not, brings with it many decisions and requests that must be handled quickly and decisively. Some say, “Any decision is more important than making no decision.” Not true--the wrong decision may haunt you, your team and your project forever. When key decisions need to be made, there is usually some influencer that stands behind it. For example, if an unplanned, urgent feature is required to be implemented, there is usually a customer behind that request. If a project delivery schedule needs to be made (even if the product being developed hasn’t been completely tested), there is usually a company financial motive behind it. You get the idea, so let’s take a look at a couple of common situations.

Situation 1: Let’s Do Everything!
There is a project that has started with a new set of features identified. This is going to be a major product update. Collectively, there is a high probability of failure, which the team has estimated to be around 75 percent (if the team attempts to build everything requested; one notable reason is that every module would have to be modified!). On top of these feature requests, management has requested performance improvements. You’ve estimated that there is far less probability of failure (25 percent, to be exact) if two of the key features were implemented with no attempt at …

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