Keep it simple…

In yesterday’s WSJ, there was a quick article about how keeping it simple paid off for one champion programmer. In a nutshell, the story is this – TopCoder ran a component design competition where 9 finalists had 6 hours to produce a solution to a given problem. The winner’s secret? He spent the first hour interviewing the person who wrote the requirements, and then designed and coded a solution that met the written and unwritten requirements and did nothing else. Wow, what a boring and simple solution. What did our winner get? $25,000 for 6 hours of work…

Many tech projects fail / disappoint / underwhelm because they fail to meet the requirements. Many tech departments and IT service providers work in a mode where they code first, and ask questions later. Their goal is to get something out there to meet the need, and then clean-up the mess after. However, all to often, no one takes the time to actually clean-up the mess after…

The winner in this simple contest highlights something to me – fixed price engagements are critical in IT projects. By working on a fixed priced basis (again regardless of whether you use internal or external IT teams), the team putting the fixed price bid together is forced (if they want to manage project risk reasonably) to do significant up-front work nailing down the requirements, detailing the design, solidifying the plans, and establishing effective change control processes.

With modern project management / program management tools such as Daptiv, and collaboration tools such as wikis and blogs, projects can be managed more transparently than ever before. By combining transparent project management, open honest communication, fixed bids, and reasonable risk management, your IT department or IT service partner can dramatically increase its success rate on IT projects.