Saving stranded projects

Where project management is hard, software project management is near impossible. Almost no large scale software projects are able to be delivered on time, on budget and with all promised features. Some projects still manage to fail harder than necessary. In the last few years, we’ve had some experience in trying to salvage projects which were near death. Here are a few things we’ve learned and hopefully help prevent you from some of the worst headaches in project management.

Keep it small

Planning large-scale projects are one of the most difficult things you can do. The bigger a project, the more likely your planning will fail. This isn’t something which can be resolved by experience. It is something inherent in the uncertainties of software development. The further away you’re looking, the more uncertain things become.

One way of tackling uncertainties is to use an agile approach to software development. However, we’ve found this still isn’t enough. Even when using short sprints with limited objectives the overall target can be very elusive. The only sure way to beat the planning problem is to split larger projects into smaller projects with a limited scope. Make sure these are deployed! Only when a program is running in a live environment, you can expect real feedback and the understanding by the people who will be using it.

You’ll get important feedback much faster by turning a single large project into multiple smaller ones. This way you’ll be able to change course much quicker. You will need a real delivery.

Start with a minimum viable product and put it into production. Then you’ll be able to start expanding on it.

Another advantage of this approach is that the initial investment can be quite small before the project starts returning a profit. This allows you to match investments to the growing income, instead of paying for everything upfront (and hoping the investment will pay off). The lean startup approach doesn’t just work for startups, it works for any project of any size.

How do you approach large projects? Tell us by reacting below or look us up on our Facebook-page.