Management Bits and Tips

Metaphorical mapping from False Positive Dump pattern brings us to False Project Failure pattern that usually happens when assessing the current project status leads to overestimating its potential failure and stakeholders think that actual failure has already happened. Let me bring an example from my own software engineering experience. One of software developers was assigned a project to develop a wizard-like installation system tightly integrated with voice recognition. Due to some reasons I don’t want to discuss here the system wasn’t developed and we faced demonstration of it in front of VP on the next day when we learnt about the nonexistence of even the prototype version. However that was only potential failure not turned to actual because we managed to create a working prototype overnight by typing screen dialogs in MS Word, print screening them to bitmap files, drawing Next and Prev buttons in MS Paint and crafting a small GUI program that sequentially displayed these pictures based on whether mouse clicks were in the region of painted buttons. The prototype was working like the clock and VP was so impressed that he didn’t even have questions to ask. The project was abandoned in another 6 months but this is another story and a different pattern. 

- Dmitry Vostokov @ ManagementBits.com -

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under Project Failure Analysis Patterns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.