Endorse Maximize your ROI, minimize your project risk Consulting
Why owning the best hammer doesn’t make you a good carpenter
Say you want to build an addition to your home. You consult an architect, who draws up the blueprints, wraps them with ribbons and hands them off to your carpenter. You take a quick look as well, but hey, you’re not an engineer, and since the architect is a professional working for you, what can go wrong?
Since the outside wall of your bedroom is going to be torn open, you decide to take a short vacation. When you return, you expect to have a beautiful walk-out deck from the master bedroom. You arrive home five days later, all excited, and run upstairs to see the new addition. But what’s gone wrong?
In your bedroom you see the new sliding doors, but they are not where you thought they would be. You go out onto the deck and it looks great, but the problem is the doors --they are eight feet away from where you wanted them, creating a permanent shadow over the kitchen window.
The carpenter did an exquisite job of installing the sliding doors and building the deck. What he didn’t do is follow the requirements to the letter. He studied them in detail, but somehow interpreted them differently. You insist the carpenter redo the work. For the carpenter, ROI is out the window and customer satisfaction is in the negative.
Does this seem similar to your company’s software development efforts? You are not alone. Consider the following statistics from the Standish Group Survey, Chaos Report (March 2003): • 66% of all software projects failed or were challenged • Cost overrun is 43% for all projects • Time overrun is 82% for all projects • Only 52% of features and functions make it to the released product
What are the major culprits here? Mismatches between the business and technical requirements top the list, and scope creep is a close second. Why do these issues continue to bedevil projects? There could be any number of reasons, but here are a few scenarios to consider:
• You award a bid to a big consulting firm. Since they are a well-known name and you are paying a lot of money, there is no need to analyze in detail what they are proposing, right? Wrong. • The estimate you received for the project is less than you figured, and work will finish earlier than expected, right? Wrong again. • Your business user decides that no review of the requirements is necessary because you belong to the same sports club, and of course you would not do anything to jeopardize the friendship.
Even if your reason is not listed above, there is no justification for not performing your due diligence regarding requirements.
After you validate your requirements, what approach will you take to implement them? Besides implementing what was requested by the business community, what else should you consider? Here are a few ideas:
• Is the proposed approach flexible enough that it can easily adapt if the business needs change? • Is the design generic enough so that similar data in the future can easily be integrated? • Your company is not global at the moment, but may be in the near future. Will you be able to support double-byte data? • Does your design have what it takes to be a robust production-ready application?
The scenarios and issues mentioned above are the focus of Endorse Consulting’s expertise. We will not sell you a solution or recommend a vendor. As our name implies, we will “endorse” the plan you have for a development effort. We are a professional second opinion, and we will critique your internal or external planned development endeavor by reviewing the requirements, analyzing the design approach, looking for best practices and offering our own time and cost estimates for reference.
Our intention is to minimize the risk to your ROI and prevent cost overruns while ensuring an on-time delivery.
Ken Pohl is the president and founder of Endorse Consulting which specializes in minimizing the risk to a project’s ROI by mitigating potential problems before they arise. His many years of developing and implementing data warehousing, business intelligence and CRM systems has provided a wealth of knowledge as proven techniques. These techniques translate into real world not from a book “best practices”.