6.1 Attracting the development effort toward the goal

The traditional approach to project management has been to drive a development toward goals using assumptions outlined in the project plan. Pushing the development has, as its roots, a get it right the first time mentality. Emphasis is typically placed upon those activities that dominate the front end (the first 30% 50%) of the project path: feature development, schedule adherence, and cost containment.

In fact, when using a traditional approach, projects are driven with the impetus to achieve aggressive deadlines and often lose sight of the following more important goals:

• Implementing a feature set actually needed by the market;

• Gleaning important customer feedback to guide product development and enhance the feature set;

• Priming product flow to the market (growing market share) by releasing products before the competition.

Unfortunately, staying on schedule, maintaining budget, and releasing a fully featured product seems to be the unwavering approach followed by most companies, yet this becomes meaningless when your competitor becomes the market leader. Sticking to your original cost estimates is useless if you fail to generate the revenues expected by dominating the market. Given that your initial estimates are going to be inaccurate, following an incorrect project plan is going to be fraught with frustration and may result in failure.

Making matters worse, many organizations believe that process will be the factor that is responsible for success. This simply perpetuates false hope.

With all of the development processes available and the amount of literature advocating the...