Chapter 15. Replan Projects in Trouble

“All too often our software is predictable—predictably late, predictably too costly, and predictably rigid.”

—Emmett Paige, Jr.

former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence1

1 Emmett Paige, Jr., “Predictable Software: Order Out of Chaos,” Crosstalk (June 1994), p. 2.

That is a striking sentence, but usually the participants don’t know their project is in this predictable trouble until late in the Main Build. At that point, we must ask, What can we do about it? Can the project be retrieved? Can it be replanned?

Before we consider these questions, however, let us look at how we got into this trouble. In Phase One, if we overlooked the critical risks, they will ...

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