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Anatomy of a Runaway Project
JCWDenton recommends a piece by Bruce Webster revealing some insights into a failed multi-million-dollar IT project. "The following document is the actual text — carefully redacted — of a memo I wrote some time back after performing an IT project review; names and identifying concepts have been changed to preserve confidentiality (and protect the guilty). The project in question was a major IT re-engineering effort for a mission-critical system; at the time I did this review, the project had been going on for several years and had cost millions of dollars; it would eventually be canceled and the work products abandoned. The memo itself provides an interesting glimpse into just how a major IT project can go so far off the tracks that nothing useful is ever delivered."
Since its already \.'d Note that the âoeABCâ consultants were a small part of the overall project team and had been brought in relatively late by âoeBigFirmâ in an attempt to get the âoeFUBARâ project into production; they neither initiated nor managed the project. [NOTE for those of you who have written or done Google searches: "Bob Winsom", like all the other names in the memo as transcribed below, is a pseudonym.]
CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM â" EYES ONLY
Over the past two weeks, Iâ(TM)ve conducted confidential off-site group interviews with all of the ABC consultants working on the FUBAR project. I did this at [ABC manager's] request, after a few of these consultants spoke privately about FUBAR with him. The feedback was consistent and raises serious doubts about whether the FUBAR project, as currently pursued, can ever yield a successful production deployment.
This report groups those comments into several broad areas. It is relatively unfiltered and extremely direct (no withholding). It represents the private comments of ABC consultants who have little to gain and possibly much to lose by being so blunt. These are not the whinings of purists picking nits. These are the grounded assessments of top-notch IT professionals who have among them a century or two of experience bringing projects to completion â" particularly those involving [specific IT] technology â" and who are down in the FUBAR trenches every day.
QUALITY OF WORK AND EFFORT
ISSUE: Several consultants said â" and the rest pretty much agreed â" that far too many of the deliverables, artifacts, and activities (e.g., algorithms, source code, system configuration, design/architecture documents, testing, defect tracking, scheduling etc.) are substantially below any acceptable professional standards and represent a profound threat to FUBAR ever going into production.
EXAMPLES: The code base is very fragile. A lot of it is bad old code that BigFirm didnâ(TM)t have time to rewrite two years ago, but now is five times its original size and even worse. One consultant said he took a code listing, picked pages at random, and found problems on every page he selected. There is pervasive hard coding of what should be adjustable parameters or at least meaningfully named constants (e.g., # of [key items] hard-coded throughout with the literal value â3â, a constant named âninety_eightâ(TM)). Builds take all night. App releases donâ(TM)t run acceptably, if at all, in a production environment. Developers check in files that wonâ(TM)t even compile.
RISKS: The FUBAR project keeps being touted as a world-class development team, but it is not producing world-class, or even minimally-professional, results. This already shows up in the project delays and quality issues of the releases to date. What the team is producing will not only be very difficult to support and modify, it will in all likelihood be unusable, resulting in a complete failure of the FUBAR project.
PROJECT PLANNING AND EXECUTION
ISSUE: Project planning and execution is all to often poor or missing completely. Milestone dates, usually unrealistic if not impossible, are based on political considerations or wishful thinking, not bottom-up grounding. Necessary and useful activities are delayed or canceled with the justification âoeWe have no time for thatâ, but the project phase ends up taking as long or longer than if the activities had been carried out. Dates are set, but nobody scrambles until the last minute. Risks are not actively tracked or managed.
EXAMPLES: Count how many times FUBAR ever produced a production-quality deliverable on anything close to a scheduled date. Even the current effort probably requires a year to get something into production, but the schedule says four months. Managers create work tasks, but then never track progress or completion. One ABC consultant created a risks
the project was doomed from the start.