3.1 The myopic view of development

Business success is difficult enough without your having to overcome obstacles that are placed in your path by your own team. Yet, this happens all the time. Employees, for reasons that are generally well documented, become enemies of the company. The end result is business sabotage although it is not seen in this light. Skeptical? You should be. Consider the following example taken from an actual project [1]. A company still generating revenue by selling an older product finds that it is no longer meeting the needs of its customer base. To address this situation, a new product idea is presented to executive management for the purposes of securing funds and proceeding with a development program.

With only the following information to draw on, would you proceed with the project?

• Developers intensely disliked maintaining the old product and wanted to design a product using a new technology.

• Because the technical manager knew the industry, technical requirements were not documented.

• Designers were very interested in their work and focused only on their area of expertise, optimizing their code.

The company proceeded with the development. It was a disaster for five reasons:

• A business case was not developed to understand if the market wanted a new technology or simply an improvement of the old working technology.

• The project was driven by technology, not market need.

• There was a lack of project assessment in terms of ongoing test activity.

• The project was seriously behind schedule.

• Milestones were...