Introduction

RC12 Vendor underestimation of the staff months required to deliver a project is probably the most common of all the root causes of troubled projects, which makes this chapter one of the most important in this book. RC12 is a special case of RC15 poor project planning, management and execution. Both root causes are bound up with:

• a failure to define the scope of the project and the work products to be produced;

• a failure to accurately estimate the size or complexity of work products (for example the size of the code; the size of associated artifacts such as requirements, design, test and user documentation; or the number of defects to find and remove);

• a failure to accurately estimate the staff-months required by the project team to produce the work products.

RC16 failure to clearly define roles and responsibilities in either the Vendor s contract with the Buyer or the Vendor s contracts with subcontractors is, once again, a special case of RC15. All of these root causes can be avoided if the solution is shaped, developed, defined and documented as described in the preceding chapters.

In Part 2 of this book we have so far discussed:

• the importance of opportunity...