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.