Long projects go cold
I love good coffee and I love good cafés. When I’ve the time to do so, I’ll spend hours in a café, thinking and writing shite like this. I prefer to order many regular-sized coffees, rather than a few large ones. This is because no matter the size of the coffee, the speed with which I drink it and the rate at which it cools stays the same, which leaves me with an unpleasant drain of cold coffee at the end. The same happens with large projects.
Humans will be humans
Long planning and development cycles, status reports and presentations and meetings, handover documents, signed approvals, user acceptance tests, focus groups. By the time long projects come to a close, a few human factors tend to kick-in:
- monotony leads to de-motivation,
- bored minds stop having new ideas,
- stifled creativity breeds mediocrity.
Change happens
Long projects with waterfall-style plans also suffer because they assume the world stays the same throughout the course of the project. A web app, for example, launched in September 2008, tested in June 2008, built in March 2008, designed in December 2007 from wireframes approved in September 2007 based on business requirements agreed upon in June 2007 will already be out-of-date. (And if you think that’s unrealistic, you’re fortunate to be unacquainted with the sad, real world of corporate / enterprise / government web projects.)
The solution is agile
Long projects go cold and the end result is usually below-par (in quality of implementation and solution) and dated (in technology and business requirements). The alternative is short, bursty, bite-sized projects that cut to the chase and allow for rapid iteration. Most people call this agile and at Contrast, we try our best to run our projects accordingly. Sure, we have separate planning, design and build phases, but we aim to keep them short and sweet and affordable and efficient. Clients get great results early and cheap, with time and money left over to make changes after they test their new sites in the field. Next time you plan a project, take the budget, time and scope, cut them in half and get to work and finish something before it goes cold.
The solution is Contrast
If you need some quality web software built and don’t want to wait until 2010, please give us a call.