| A "death march" is a project where the schedule has been arbitrarily compressed by half, the budget has been reduced by 50% or more, the requirements of the project are more than 50% of what can be reasonably expected, or for whatever reason, the risk of project failure is greater than 50%. Companies continue to create death-march projects. Rational, intelligent people sign up for a death-march project whose schedules, estimations, budgets, and resources are so constrained or skewed that participants can hardly survive, much less succeed.
In Death March, Second Edition, Ed Yourdon sheds new light on the reasons why companies spawn Death Marches and provides you with guidance to identify and survive death march projects. Yourdon covers the project lifecycle, addressing the key issue participants face: politics, people, process, project management, & tools. No matter what your role - developer, project leader, line-of-business manager, or CxO - you'll find realistic, usable solutions. Coverage includes: Creating Mission Impossible projects out of DM projects; Negotiating your project's conditions: making the best of a bad situation; XP, agile methods, and death march projects; Time management for teams: eliminating distractions that can derail your project. "Critical chain scheduling": identifying & eliminating organizational dysfunction; Predicting the "straw that breaks the camel's back": lessons from system dynamics; Choosing tools & methodologies most likely to work in your environment; Project "flight simulators": wargaming your next project; Applying triage to deliver the features that matter most; When it's time to walk away. This is a book about your project, in your company. But you won't just recognize your reality: you'll learn exactly what to do about it. | |
