What Should I Do Tomorrow?

Start by recognizing that no single methodology definition can possibly suit all projects. Don't even think that the Rational Unified Process, Unified Process, or the Something Else methodology will fit your project out of the box. If you follow a methodology out of the box, you will have one that fits some project in the world, but probably not yours.

Practice noticing how the seven principles of methodology design relate to your project:

• Look for where your team could benefit from using warmer communications channels and where cooler ones are needed.

• Identify the bottleneck activities on your project:

  • Track them as they change.

  • Invent ways to utilize some other group's excess capacity to streamline the bottleneck group's work or to reduce uncertainty.

• Reduce the internal deliverables on your project:

  • Arrange for higher-bandwidth communication channels between the developers and opportunities for rapid feedback, and you will find that some of the promissory notes are no longer really needed.

  • Find the bottleneck activities, and see if you can trade efficiency elsewhere for increased productivity at the bottleneck station.

• Find a place where lightening the methodology would actually cause damage. Think about what might be an alternative.

• Review the list of purposes of a methodology. Evaluate the purpose of your group's methodology, and then rank its effectiveness with respect to that purpose.

• Practice naming the scope and elements of your methodology and other methodologies. Observe how much they differ due to addressing different scopes or different priorities.

• Look at the different methodologies in use on different projects, and evaluate them according to how they address their different project sizes.

• Experiment with the difference between problem size and project size.

• Can you think of a project that had more people than it needed?

• Can you think of a difficult problem that was turned into an easy problem through the application of some particular point of view?

Level 2 readers:

• Add these ideas to your bag of tricks.

• Learn where to apply, adjust, and drop them.

Level 3 readers: See if you can explain these ideas to someone else.