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Proven Techniques for Glorious Failure:
# 5 The Self-Imploding Project

by Kevin Christ

So, you want to learn more new ways to cripple projects, my Project Assassin trainees. Lesson 5 incorporates “project jujitsu” – using the tendencies and the weight of projects against themselves to bring them crashing down .

The subtle brilliance of this approach is that you can assess the tendency and direction that a project is already leaning, and simply tip it increasingly further in that direction. You will actually appear supportive and cooperative while pushing the project to its demise.

“What is this secret weapon?” you ask. Project Standards. Of course, they exist for a legitimate purpose – to ensure common language, common understanding of progress, common interpretation of deliverables when handed-off, and avoiding reinvention of the throwing star, er, wheel. However, when deployed properly, standards are lethal! If management believes in tight standards, tighten them further.

If standards are loose, strive to eliminate them completely. Let me explain…

Tight Standards

Standards are good. This can be gleaned from PMI, SEI, CMMI, COBIT, ISACA, IEEE, Six Sigma, Lean, RUP and many other “objective” organizations and frameworks that sustain themselves by creating, publishing and certifying standards. The standards must be good—they are printed in the articles and trade journals published by the groups themselves! An entire industry has been spawned around setting standards as an alternative to actually doing productive work.

In the right hands (your hands) however, standards can put a stranglehold on all progress. Key techniques to implement:

• Enforce all standards, no matter what! Again, by definition, standards are good—that’s why they are standard. If one standard is good, think of the power of multiple standards working in concert (to destroy).

• Embrace each and every step of every standard. If there are 400 steps, follow them all. Set up checklists that force none to be missed. If even one step is missing, simply state “Do not pass Go!” and reject any real progress. Hang motivational posters on the walls like, “Thinking is for People who can’t handle Dogma!”

• Once you’ve chosen your standards, train and certify everyone in the entire organization in advance—all the way through five-star-executive-black-belt-green-beret-blue-angel-top-gun-master-guru-ninja-jedi. Don’t wait to find out if the standards are improving results or not before certifying!!! Of course they’ll work in your environment—they’re standards!!!

• Demand the triumph of form over substance. No matter how good the content and thinking are, reject any deliverables that are in the wrong font.

• Finally, plan and track every sub-step of every activity and every deliverable—don’t specify “breathe” when you can specify “inhale” and “exhale” separately. Find a recently born-again-PMP to “Dot every ‘T’ and cross every ‘I’.” (Yes, I know the “I” and “T” are reversed. Just write it into the standards and they’ll do it.) After all, with a PMP you can install SAP or build a sidewalk—it’s the same test and same certification.

The bottom line, Standards are nuclear weapons for a trained Project Assassin.

Loose Standards

Here comes the real twist. If rigorous standards have brought a company to its reckoning in the past, the next project(s) will likely have VERY loose standards—a one page outline and a couple of control gates. Dogma will yield to individual judgment and the freedom to reach peak performance. However loose the standards, loosen them further and let chaos rule the day.

• Use words like “accelerate” and “iterate” to justify an absolute lack of standards. “We don’t need a scope—we’re prototyping.” “Our work is directionally correct.” “Look how much time we saved by coding on the first day instead of waiting until we knew what we were building.” Words like these will put any standards geeks on their heels and move you to a loose environment. Put up motivation posters picturing a large boat anchor with a heavy chain and the word “standards” written on the side.

• Avoid documentation at all costs. Documentation slows a team down—all that writing is absolutely no fun. Why capture the alternatives considered, the agreed upon requirements and the agreed upon designs? Hey, if you really all agreed, why waste time writing it down? Of course you’ll all remember what you agreed to many months later and any new guys should just ask and believe you. In addition, documentation makes it very hard to interpret history to your advantage at a later date. Explain to the entire team the risks of being held accountable for their commitments.

• Appeal to egos. No self respecting professional wants to follow someone else’s standards—doesn’t “professional” mean that each of you is smarter than the rest of you? “Who died and made the standards-guy emperor, anyway?” This is America, and nobody can tell us how to do our jobs. It’s a free country.

• Standards often take years to write, refine, and amend. By the time they are completed, technology may have passed them up. After all, “You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.”

In closing, let us reflect together on that powerful, fatal pendulum that standards represent for all project assassins. The Project Assassin can easily kill a project on the upstroke or downstroke of the pendulum. Standards can paralyze a project. Absence of standards can turn the project into a food fight.

The following quotes can be used to advance your standards strategy.

Too much of a good thing can kill you. (e.g. x-rays)

Too much of a good thing can be bad. (e.g. beer)

Too much of a good thing is wonderful -Mae West

Too much of a good thing can and should be taxed liberally. -Present U.S. Administration

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Avalion Tip: Most standards are not universally good and applicable in all situations. In fact, too many standards can conflict with each other and paralyze the team. Balance the cost of coordination and controls against the benefits.

Avalion Tip: Tailor the published standards to your company. Tailor them to your project. Tailor them to the capabilities of the project team. Tailor them to the acceptable risks and the overall timeline for the project. Good judgment is not replaced by a book, a document or a policy.

Avalion Tip: While documentation can be costly and expensive, it prevents misunderstandings, differing recollections, changes in stakeholder assignments, and a host of other challenges. Take the time to write it down.

Avalion Tip: While standards cannot guarantee success, a total lack of standards can virtually guarantee failure...

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About the Author: While the identity and whereabouts of the Project Assassin remain unknown, Kevin Christ, Vice President of IT Services with Avalion Consulting, has spent his career battling the evil forces of the Project Assassin and his forces in program management, project management and project rescue. He is known for his business acumen, his technical insight and a troubling sense of humor. Kevin has been a management consultant for almost 25 years and his full profile can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/kchrist. He can be e‑mailed at kchrist@avalion.com.