Ingredients of a successful project
You understand the business impact of your project and you have a team eager to start; now what? You must have a plan, of course. As the German field marshal Moltke the Elder put it (or at least the modern paraphrase of it), “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
Half a century later, Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower added, “Plans are of little importance [or are worthless], but planning is essential [or indispensable].”
Agile software development
Over the past decade, Agile software management has taken over the world, replacing waterfall project execution with Scrum and Gantt charts with Kanban boards and iterative and incremental delivery every two weeks instead of multi-year development cycles with long lead times and expensive Quality Assurance (QA) and support cycles. Statistics show that Agile projects have a higher success rate than waterfall projects. This intuitively makes sense...
