“We tried agile and it didn’t work” is one of the most revealing things a leader can hear.
“We tried agile and it didn’t work” is one of the most revealing things a leader can hear.
In context
- Topic: Proyectos, PMO y Riesgos — Gestión de proyectos, oficinas de proyecto y riesgo del portafolio.
- Source: Mountain Goat Software
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Why it matters
In project management, nearly everything discussed as a technical problem is really a problem of expectations badly negotiated at the start. Scope, time and cost were agreed at a moment when nobody had enough information, and afterwards nobody wanted to reopen the conversation.
I read these things looking for where the risk sat before it became an incident. It was almost always already written in some register nobody reviewed, with an assigned owner who never found out they were one. A risk identified and not managed is worse than one never identified: it creates the false sense that there is control.
What usually goes wrong
The classic mistake is treating risk management as a deliverable of the planning phase. The matrix gets built, approved, filed. Nobody opens it again until closure, when it serves to document that the risk was foreseen — which is exactly the opposite of managing it.
What to watch
- The size of the first useful delivery: the further out it is, the more it resembles a bet.
- How it was estimated and how close the same organisation's previous estimates turned out to be.
- Who the sponsor is and how often they actually show up — not on the org chart, in the calendar.
How I read this entry
If this landed on my desk, the first thing I would ask for is not percentage complete: it is the list of pending decisions with a name and a date. A percentage can be dressed up; a decision stuck for three weeks with an identified owner cannot be argued with, and it explains the delay far better.
This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.
Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
