Too many projects, presentations, and products go off the rails because of incomplete data. As Mark Twain said, “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as you please.”
The Project Management Institute states that inadequate requirements gathering is one of the most common causes of project failure. Often, a good user story and a clear definition of “done” are missing. Ongoing feedback throughout a project is also essential, which is why agile management is highly popular. It allows you to test drive your data as you go along.
However, I’ve seen too many teams that kept their grand ideas under wraps without feedback, resulting in catastrophic demos of websites, marketing plans, and product concepts. I used to have a sign on my desk, “Friends don’t let friends do big reveals.”
Presentations and products can also suffer from recurring elegance delays, such as endless fussing about colors and form factors. For that, project management guru Fred Brooks had a sign that read, “Present to inform, not to impress. If you inform, you will impress.”
Our access to data is overwhelming, and it’s getting harder to fact-check. Google AI Overview has provided some strange answers, such as that running with scissors is good for your health. I’ll have to find some supporting data for that.
