The Standish Group 2013 CHAOS Manifesto Report titled “Think Big Act Small” presents two core concepts to achieve more successful projects. The first key is to break a project down into small independent components that can be managed and delivered separately. The second key is eliminating features that provide little or no business value. Let’s examine both of these.
Breaking a Project Down
It is important not to confuse breaking down projects as simply defining milestones, phases, critical paths, and activities. These are simply components of a single large project. It literally means breaking a project down into a series of independent smaller projects. Each smaller project is defined, developed, and delivered independently producing a valuable result.
The Standish Group says “A large project has virtually no chance of coming in on time, on budget, and within scope, which is The Standish Group definition of a successful project.” The Standish Group reports that large projects are 10 times more likely to fail, meaning the project will be canceled or will not be used because it outlived its useful life prior to implementation. In contrast, small projects have more than a 70% chance of success.
Breaking down a large project into a series of smaller projects does not require migrating to agile, although use of the agile methodology can help in this regard. Breaking one large project into five or ten smaller projects and delivering each one independently can greatly improve the likelihood of overall success. Breaking down a project is not always easy, but can be done. The writers of this CHAOS Manifesto Report state flatly that they have come to believe that “there is no need for large projects, and that any IT project can be broken into a series of small projects that could also be done in parallel if necessary.”
Eliminating Features that Provide Little or No Value
Previous Standish Group research showed that 64% of features developed are rarely or never used. The task of gathering and analyzing requirements is the most difficult for custom applications. However, most organizations lack good methods for defining, validating, and prioritizing features for their solutions. Many organizations do not even start with features, they start with solution requirements, which is a sure recipe for frustration when it comes to defining what is in or out of solution scope.
The Pareto Principle applies to software development positing that there is no doubt that focusing on the 20% of the features that give you 80% of the value will both maximize the investment in software development and improve user satisfaction. The difficult part is choosing the next 20 – 30% to be worked on and choosing not to deliver the 50% of functionality that will never be used. In most organizations, executives and stakeholders want all of the functionality and want it all now. However, this approach of trying to deliver every idea is simply not practical, places many projects at risk, and makes software development very expensive and wasteful.
Reducing scope and breaking up large projects are difficult tasks. Most project management tools and approaches do not support these concepts well as they are focused on managing project scope and not solution scope, which are not the same. Project scope includes the work needed to create a product or deliver a service or result. Project scope defines the work required to create and deploy the product. Solution scope describes the characteristics, features, or functions of the product or service to be built. Solution scope is all about the solution to be implemented: how will it look and how will it function. Traditionally, the project manager defines project scope and a business analyst defines solution scope.
A new breed of tools is beginning to emerge that enable the key concepts identified in the Standish Group Report to be achieved. One leading example is Enfocus Requirements Suite™, a Software as a Service product from Enfocus Solutions Inc. This tool allows features to be defined and validated independently and then delivered as a series of small projects (bundles). The benefits of applying these two techniques using a tool such as Enfocus Requirements Suite™ quickly becomes evident when the organization starts to receive value earlier and projects success rates soar.
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