Does the End Justify the Means?

Brad Egeland is an IT/project management consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management and project management experience leading initiatives in manufacturing, government contracting, gaming and hospitality, retail operations, aviation and airline, pharmaceutical, start-ups, healthcare, higher education, not-for-profit, high-tech, engineering and general IT.

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You’re the project manager. You’ve assembled the project team or had them assigned to you. At this point, you’ve got a decent idea of the high level requirements of the project and what the overall outcome of the project should be.

Struggling with suggested technologies
Now the question stands--does the end goal of the project ever justify getting there any way you can? Should the end goal drive the technology, or should it be the other way around? What if the customer wants a particular technology to be used? What if management or a team member is pushing for a particular technology for the solution? However, when you step back and observe the big picture, it appears that the suggested solution may not be the best one--or that there are possibly several different paths to the end goal and they need to be equally analyzed before choosing a best and final solution.

The problem with allowing the technology to drive the solution is that the team and the customer may be operating with blinders on. A favorite or familiar technology may not truly offer the best solution. Even a new technology that has the customer drooling may not be the right answer.

Taking off the blinders
The first lesson the project manager needs to learn is that the customer doesn’t always know what they want. My clients are usually very intelligent and experienced, but…

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