10 Milestones and management decisions

 

This chapter covers:

  • Using well-formulated milestones to increase the odds of project success.
  • Using milestones to improve management decision making about project progress.
  • Evaluating likely financial outcomes of projects as they progress, in a more sophisticated way than one-time investment return calculations.
  • Making contracts more compatible with agility, and with improved financial decision making about projects

Ed Koch, former mayor of New York, was famous for asking publicly “How’m I doin’?” This reflects his awareness that, as chief executive of an enormous municipal government, he could easily become isolated from the people and their concerns, and from the day-to-day workings of the city.

When it comes to the right questions to ask, who should be asking them, and when they should be asking them, there is a challenging balance to strike: The senior management of an enterprise should not, for a wide range of reasons, engage in micro-managing software projects. Yet, they must be aware of the most important developments in their enterprises.

Chapter 4 is about how Agile project managers can use an initial analysis of a project to continue to ask questions that are designed to steer a project toward success, or to identify when success is out of reach. But not all of the ways projects may need a rethink are identifiable from that kind of analysis.

10.1 How are we doing?

10.1.1 Interventions are always too late

10.1.2 Respond to change

10.2 Agile isn't “meta”

10.3 Meaningful milestones

10.3.1 Milestones, resources, and tactical resource management

10.3.2 Milestones manage management

10.4 You are beating your project plan or your project is beating you

10.5 What about metrics?

10.5.1 Measurement is seductive

10.5.2 Examples of precise metrics

10.5.3 Goodhart’s law applied to software

10.6 Milestones and management decision-making frameworks

10.6.1 Simple investment decision calculations

10.6.2 Milestones and options

10.6.3 Minimum viable product as an example of an option

10.6.4 Agility and early-stage options

10.6.5 Real options and changing requirements

10.6.6 Going back to the beginning should be normal, and it isn’t failure

10.6.7 Feature creep and options