Do you always experience similar results with two different projects that are very similar? Or do you ever have two similar projects that have significantly different outcomes? I’ve had this experiences. One project had the most typical elements of a failure project: go-live was delayed; we had an over-run budget; there were endless bugs and exhausted team members. But the other one was the opposite: the release was on schedule, there were few bugs, and each team member enjoyed work-life balance .
What factors cause such difference? When we hold a retrospective meeting, we can get a long list of items that we do differently between the two projects. But which one will be on the top of the list? I didn’t have the answer for a long time until recently when I reviewed the release plan of the first project. I found the following statement at the Assumption section of the release plan:
Scope is locked. All Functionality must be delivered before XXX.
This is a quite popular statement in many projects’ SOW or release plan. It may not cause problems for the average project; but it has the potential to make a more complex project a nightmare.
