As projects progress through a transition from lust to dust, uncertainty is progressively reduced over time. The responsibility to manage this risk is shared between an organization's leadership and the project team members. The project team should manage the risk factors that could disrupt satisfying the needs of all stakeholders with the product that is planned to be developed. In parallel, the organization's leadership should manage the risks which are external to the project and impact multiple projects across the organization's project, product, and service portfolio. A delicate balancing act is necessary in performing this risk management, since it is easy for leadership to become too focused in managing the details of individual projects, at the expense of attention to necessary structural impediments. If leadership is not sufficiently involved, projects may not have adequate support among decision-makers, and resources may be wasted due to poor execution, or consume resources that would be more appropriately used elsewhere. Read more »

Decision-making requires us to understand a situation and accurately weigh the alternatives which present themselves to us. To gain such an understanding, we need to do far more than just collect facts and information. Our understanding is subject to all kinds of flaws and biases in our perceptions of reality. As John Sterman describes it: 

Decision-making processes are also unfortunately prone to political influences and increasing bureaucracy. These factors can combine to delay conclusions and dilute our focus on achieving desirable outcomes. Fred Brooks describes these distractions as follows: 

In How Decision-making can be improved, authors Milkman, Chugh, and Bazerman summarize the primary challenges of decision-makers: Read more »

Structured processes are a logical, evolutionary advancement that has emerged from the painful lessons of applying unstructured, ad-hoc methods to problem solving in product development. When products are produced by craftsman, there is a high reliance on their experience and its relevance to a particular circumstance. As the impacts of complexity in producing these products increased, the teams required to build those products became larger. This made it more difficult to control who could work on the teams, and the expertise and discipline that was expected of them. As a result, a cry arose for more systematic, repeatable methods that would produce more reliable outcomes regardless of who was on a team.

Yet an over-emphasis on process is frequently cited as a burden that constrains developers from pursuing their passion. 

Today, countless development and manufacturing standards have been refurbished to attempt to address process yield that is less than 100%. Too often, organizations have adopted such standards as protectionist legislation to reduce competition, rather than because they guarantee higher quality outcomes. Read more »