After the Project Completion

After the project is completed, analyses should be performed to determine how the process methodology served the organization. The process presented in this chapter was the result of this type of analyses in the course of producing web portal software. For example, the façade step was introduced because sales and marketing did not understand the functional specification and needed to see the screen in the web browser to understand how it functioned. The development cycles generally lasted six months, but the organization wanted the site to be enhanced more often. As a result, development shortened the cycles to three months and also discovered that they could produce the enhancements with greater reliability because there was less work to do.

Analyses should be performed to answer the following questions:

• What were the differences between the actual and planned milestone or delivery exchange dates in the plan? This question helps the organization optimize the estimation process that took place in the project for the next project. Drastic variances in these items might also indicate an inability to predict or measure the organization's resource.

• Were there great differences between the amount of resources required to make deliverables versus the estimated resources? This question helps the organization optimize the estimation process that took place in the project for the next project.

• Was the owner satisfied with the solution? If the owner is not pleased, some improvement in the strategy with managing owner expectations may be necessary.

• Was the owner satisfied with the way the solution was delivered? Deployment issues are often overlooked in the requirements gathering process. If the owner was not pleased with the delivery, some additional effort may be required to prevent this dissatisfaction with future owners.

• What failures were encountered and why are they failures? Are the problems anomalies or systematic and thereby indicative of a required change in process?

• Was the project profitable? This answer might help the business decision makers decide to pursue these types of projects in the future.

• Are there opportunities to capitalize on the solution that were built in an effort to sell it to other organizations? Many time and materials software companies found their niche in the product market by asking this question. If one owner wants the solution, others might be willing to pay for it also.

• Can a repeatable and profitable business process be observed? If an owner keeps coming back for more work, there might be an opportunity to up-sell an automated solution to the owner to save them maintenance costs.

  Note 

  Take care to change processes based on issues that are systematic and not just anomalies. A process is not an indication of personal success or failure, and it's unreasonable to identify a process's success as a failure simply because some situations did not execute flawlessly. To make progress under these circumstances (which can be very stressful), the process should not be changed unless the issues are observed on other occasions under other circumstances.