reviewed by Conrad Weisert, December 2001
Enlightened system development life-cycle (SDLC) methodologies call for a final
"Project Review" phase, in order to learn from mistakes and bad decisions
and thereby to do better on future projects. In the review phase, the project
team assesses:
While Norman Kerth strongly supports doing a project review, he approaches
it from the point of view of a so-called "retrospective facilitator".
Those two words are our first clue that the book is going to be more about the author's
own role than about project performance, more about making the project team feel good
than about objective evaluation.
Kerth provides a wealth of references to other books and articles, nearly all of them
having a similar strong emphasis on the psychological and the political
aspects of project management.
Parts of this book mesh nicely with Ed Yourdon's terrific
Death March book. Kerth emphasizes failed
projects, switching terminology in chapter 7 from "retrospective" to
"post mortem". Veterans of such projects will particularly appreciate
his list of popular techniques for saving face (pp. 178-179).
Kerth's view of project failure, however, will be too narrow
for many organizations. We all agree that a project that spends millions of
dollars over several years and produces nothing useful is a failure, but so are
many projects that ultimately do deliver a working system.
His three fuzzy reasons (p. 173) why big projects fail lack the concreteness that an
impatient manager will seek. For example:
It's hard to tell just what the author regards as positive criteria.
There are numerous references to the long-discredited lines of code
measurement, as well as number of defects and ratios between the two.
On the other hand, I found few references either to such crucial measures of project
performance as:
A retrospective turns out not to be a kind of project review, but
rather something you might do in addition to a normal objective
project review. It appears most useful for addressing low-morale among
the project team participants. If that's what you need, you'll find some
helpful guidance here.
The framework
A Death March Companion
Important decisions were made poorly or weren't made at all.
Quantitative measures
or to such measures of end-product quality as:
Recommendation
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Last modified December 8, 2001