Thursday, October 01, 2009

I normally am a very upbeat, super optimistic, glass is half full type.

As a product development and hype spewing evangelist, I remind my clients of a Dogbert line in a Dilbert cartoon... "there is a fine line between marketing and fraud" which I say with a big smile, and then we get to work crafting the press releases about what the product will do.

Today, I feel like a person who Spiro Agnew was speaking of when he spoke of - "Nattering nabobs of negativism" - while Agnew said this, it was actually their speechwriter William Safire who coined it... but i digress...

I am working on a project that is making my brain melt.

Today, while doing some research, I stumbled across this.

Matthew E. May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, who describes what he calls the Seven Laws of Projects:

1. A major project is never completed on time, within budget, or with the original team, and it never does exactly what it was supposed to.

2. Projects progress quickly until they become 85% complete. Then they remain 85% complete forever. Think of this as the Home Improvement Law.

3. When things appear to be going well, you’ve overlooked something. When things can’t get worse, they will. (Murphy’s Law says, “If something can go wrong, it will”—this is a corollary).

4. Project teams hate weekly progress reports because they so vividly manifest the lack of progress.

5. A carelessly planned project will take three times longer to complete than expected. A carefully planned project will only take twice as long as expected. Also, ten estimators will estimate the same work in ten different ways. And one estimator will estimate ten different ways at ten different times.

6. The greater the project’s technical complexity, the less you need a technician to manage it.

7. If you have too few people on a project, they can’t solve the problems. If you have too many, they create more problems than they can solve.

Ain't that the truth.