Sometimes a Check Sheet is all the Data you Need
Being data-driven in a sea of anecdotes
As the company’s new COO, I was reviewing the list of programming projects. One of them was over a year old and estimated to take nearly 6 months to complete. I called the VP of development.
Finding the problem
“Can you tell me about this project?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “That’s a full rewrite of the billing system. It’s a huge project. It’s likely to break a whole lot of things so the testing is significant. And we aren’t even sure yet whether it will fix the problem.”
“What exactly is the problem?” I asked.
“Sometimes, the billing system does this weird thing with this fee. It’s a small amount of money but customer service gets a ton of calls and it’s creating a lot of work. We know we need to get it fixed. Plus we hate the way the billing system works, so we might as well rewrite it while we’re at it.”
Problem #1. Scope creep. Developers are amazing learners. They’ll build something the way they know how to build it, then in 6 months realize there was a better way to program it. So they spend the next 6 years looking for a project that will give them the opportunity to “fix” their old programming, even if it isn’t broken.
