One aspect of continuous improvement is to thoughtfully apply practices that many other projects have found to be valuable, provided they’re appropriate for your project and team culture. However, it’s also a good idea to recognize the common mistakes project managers make so you can avoid them. The lessons painfully learned because something didn’t go as planned are the most vivid. You don’t have time to make every mistake that every previous project manager has already made, so you need to learn from their hard-won wisdom. McConnell (1996) identified many classic mistakes for both project initiation and project management, as shown in Table 14-2.
Table 14-2. Some Classic Project Management Mistakes (McConnell 1996)
Project Initiation | Project Planning and Tracking |
|---|---|
Lack of effective project sponsorship | Adding people to a late project (Brooks 1995) |
Unrealistic expectations | Wishful thinking |
Lack of stakeholder buy-in | Insufficient risk management |
Overly optimistic schedules | Insufficient planning |
Push-me, pull-me negotiation | Abandonment of planning under pressure |
Overestimated savings from new tools or methods | Insufficient management controls |
Omitting necessary tasks from estimates | |
Planning to catch up later |
Antipattern is a term related to the concept of a classic mistake. An antipattern "describes a commonly occurring solution to a problem that generates decidedly negative consequences" (Brown et al. 1998). As with patterns, which describe broadly applicable solutions to recurrent problems, antipatterns have concise and sometimes whimsical names. Each antipattern describes the general form that the undesirable practice takes; its symptoms, consequences, and causes; and a better solution. Project management antipatterns include the following:
Analysis Paralysis. Thrashing on requirements and models in a quest for perfection early in the project.
Death by Planning. Spending excessive effort on multiple levels of highly detailed plans, which are assumed to define a perfect path to a successful project.
Irrational Management. The manager cannot make decisions, direct development staff, or deal with a crisis.
Project Mismanagement. Key project activities, such as quality control steps, are overlooked or minimized, which leads to excessive defects being found during integration and system testing.
Smoke and Mirrors. Customers are led to believe that impossible capabilities can be delivered.
Becoming familiar with software industry best practices, classic mistakes, and antipatterns can help every project manager choose and apply the most appropriate set of practices for a given situation. As you gain project management experience, you’ll accumulate your own body of techniques on which to rely and your own list of traps to avoid.