Bulldozer00's Blog

“Break on through to the other side – The Doors

Any project of appreciable size is most likely partitioned into phases where specialists (systems, software, test) that do the work in one phase “hand off” their work products to a new group of specialists in the next phase. One challenge to managing these types of multidisciplinary projects is avoiding the “over the wall” syndrome. You know, the case where the specialist group in phase N chucks their work product over the wall to a previously uninvolved specialist group in phase N+1. Surprise!

One textbook way of attempting to smooth the transitioning of work between groups is by holding an official “review” to serve as a visible waypoint in the project’s trajectory. Done well, a “review” can increase the quality of the work and inter-group relationships. However, done poorly, it is just a self-medicating waste of time where poor work is camouflaged and it serves as a stage for slick talking politicians to increase their stock.

As the figure below illustrates, an alternative to the one-shot, review-based project is the continuous review-based project. The “official” review is still held at a discrete point in time, but since collaborative inter-group communications were initiated well before the review, specialist group 2 will experience fewer “surprises” at review time.

Nevertheless, continuous review-based projects can still fail just as spectacularly as one-shot review-based projects. Can you think of how and why?