Large Project Chicken


"Oh, that's easy," Roscoe replied. "The boys down at NASA relearned that one. It's called large project chicken. On any large project, people always think that the other guy is going to be 'more late' than they are. They depend on the notion that their small slip will be masked by the other guy's even bigger slip. The folklore at NASA was that on any launch countdown, you had to get into the single digits before someone would blink first and stop the launch. They were all waiting for the other guy to chicken out first."

Now that sounded really serious. Roscoe confirmed that it was.

"Yeah, that whole psychology is really foobarred," Roscoe finished, showing that he had learned some software lingo. "Any time you couple your 'success' to someone else's failure, you are on the road to perdition. But, in fact, that is what 'large project chicken' is all about. You are counting on the other guy to screw up worse than you. It is a very destructive force against good project morale and it totally undermines the idea of a high-trust environment."

Roscoe was right again, but I had a few more arrows in my quiver.




The Software Development Edge(c) Essays on Managing Successful Projects
The Software Development Edge(c) Essays on Managing Successful Projects
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 269

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