Project Management 101

Today I sat in on a meeting where, from what I could tell, eighteen months of effort was being devalued because of a badly managed project.

Basically, there was never any proper intake of requirements.

This is a project I've seen in my peripheral vision; it doesn't really impact me directly, though it takes inputs from some of the processes I manage.

What happened was basically this: a manager wanted a uniform interface between two computer systems that used similar but different technologies. The goal was to provide our customers with a single point of access that they could be trained on, and to provide an access control layer that allowed them to see and modify some information, but not other types of information. This is about as detailed as I can get without getting too technical.

An engineer was hired to build this system. This took about a year. Rumor has it that he built something similar elsewhere, and just had to apply his earlier craftsmanship to the details of our particular environment.

The problem is that the manager simply hired him and said, essentially, "build an interface for these two systems". There was no consultation with the final customers - the people who would use the system. There was no consultation with the people providing inputs into these systems - people such as myself who create objects that are referenced by the system. It would be as if you started selling cars without assessing whether the market preferred right-hand or left-hand steering wheels, automatic or manual transmission, or even the color of the car.

These questions all came after the project was more or less constructed.

The result is that for the past six months, all of the stakeholders have submitted numerous requests for changes, some coasmetic, some minor, a few very major. Because no requirements were even formally defined, there is no way to properly end the project. Stakeholders can keep submitting feature requests, "tweaks" until the engineer finally leaves or stops responding.

It's not a bad system, and it does fulfill a need. However, this project is a clear example of what happens all to often in the business world: resources are dumped into a "great idea" with no assessment of the value of the idea or how it will be implemented.