Death From Perfection

Assuming this means when a project fails because the team is trying to achieve some unreasonable perfect solution. DoTheBestYouCan would be a better alternative.

More likely the failure comes from investing resources out of proportion with any possible benefit. Often you will be more successful if you do much less than you could. The art is in knowing what is valuable. The best strategy is to ask. Effectively asking questions isn't all that easy which explains why so many projects fail.

A project once sank man-years of effort trying to get a little help screen to automatically pop up when needed (as specified in the requirements). As a high paid trouble shooter to the at-risk project I suggested that users be required to push a button to get the help. This was coded overnight and the project was saved. -- WardCunningham

Ward applied the necessary "jiggle", but that begs the question of why that requirement went unchallenged while development time continued to be sunk. Was there no perceived process for challenging requirements? Did the team lack a "jiggler" of its own? -- DaveSmith

There were lots of circumstances that concealed the simplicity of the situation. As an outsider I was expected to ask questions, and ask I did. That's all. -- WardCunningham

I think this shows the RealValueOfConsultants

CategoryIdealism