Hollywood Secrets of Project Management Success

Divergence and Discontinuity

A common characteristic of troublesome projects is poor quality. When a team develops something that proves on delivery to be less than suitable for its intended use, the fallout can ripple in many directions: The team may be confused about what went wrong. Resources may have to be reallocated to address the situation. Subsequent planned activities may have to be readjusted. Customer confidence may erode. Poor quality can come from many sources. The most direct one is incompetence, the basic inability to do the work. But in technology development, that’s also the rarest. Most people in IT tend to be competent. A more likely source of poor quality is less direct but imminently more common: weak communication. Weak communication ...