12.8 Follow the Bouncing Ball

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Confusion in the project world is hardly a rare condition. In fact, you might discover that team members cause this for their own nefarious purposes. Regardless, large projects present those moments when something is broken and a quick fix is not readily apparent. If you take a step back and compare the cacophony of your present initiative with former ones, you can find a pattern that should give you hope that all is not lost - at least not yet.

I have given this phenomenon other names too, such as "Curing World Hunger." I recently got involved in a data center remediation project tasked with cleaning up operational and staffing snafus. I became involved to help implement "fixes" documented by a SWAT team audit. At the first meeting I held to begin formulating an implementation strategy for these requirements, the subject matter experts began stampeding toward rebuilding the whole data center. Not that the requirements on the agenda were trivial, but the team went off to try and cure world hunger when making a few cheese sandwiches was all that was needed.

I have seen this happen so many times that I use the confusion to gain some insight into the technology and technologists who were previously unknown to me. Within hours after this particular meeting, however, I sent out a note that clearly put a fence around implementing the requirements given to us and excluding all the other "nice to have" ideas from project scope. Although this process can be troublesome, it happens all the time, so if you have not learned how to watch out for and avoid it yet, take the time to do so now.

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