Pre-Requisites
The Vicious Circle
The inevitable failure of traditional large scale projects leads us into this circle, a circle that everyone in software development has seem to some extent, and into which you can enter at any point and know exactly what is coming next.
The circle is almost always the result of managements need to put more and more control around a failed project, becaue it failed. Their only solution to the problem is to require finer grained visibility, more reports, more checkpoints, ultimately missing the point of the failure, but if they are not seen to act on the failure then this is also seen as a problem.
The more control required, invariably leads to the need for more documentation as this is as a tangible measurement of progress. The more needless documentation, therefore leads to increased stress to produce, often cutting and pasting the same information from one document to another, becuase one department needs it in a different format.
Stress therefore has an impact on productivity, which can only mean the next project will be another failure, and around we go again
Next Steps