I had to write this down somewhere for fear of losing it (or worse, forgetting about it):
"If a project offered a value of 10 times its estimated cost, no one would care if the actual cost to get it done were double the estimate. On the other hand, if expected value were only 10 percent greater than expected cost, lateness would be a disaster.
Yes it would be a disaster, but instead of obsessing over “What’s the matter with those software folks who didn’t deliver on the schedule we gave them?” we need to ask instead “Why did we ever kick off a project with such marginal expected value?”
The louder the complaints about project lateness, the more likely it is that the project set out to deliver marginal value and was therefore kicked off under the false premise that it could be completed on the cheap. What’s really wrong with us software folks is that we’re continually beating ourselves up for something that’s somebody else’s fault."
All Late Projects Are the Same — Tom DeMarco
"If a project offered a value of 10 times its estimated cost, no one would care if the actual cost to get it done were double the estimate. On the other hand, if expected value were only 10 percent greater than expected cost, lateness would be a disaster.
Yes it would be a disaster, but instead of obsessing over “What’s the matter with those software folks who didn’t deliver on the schedule we gave them?” we need to ask instead “Why did we ever kick off a project with such marginal expected value?”
The louder the complaints about project lateness, the more likely it is that the project set out to deliver marginal value and was therefore kicked off under the false premise that it could be completed on the cheap. What’s really wrong with us software folks is that we’re continually beating ourselves up for something that’s somebody else’s fault."
All Late Projects Are the Same — Tom DeMarco
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