Use Complementary Practices on a Team-by-Team Basis

Complementary practices include the project’s life cycle and any development, testing, or other management practices the team uses. It does not work for one team to use a waterfall life cycle, delivering everything at the end, and to have another team use an iterative life cycle, looking for periodic feedback.

Use Complementary Life Cycles

First make sure each subproject team is using complementary life cycles. Don’t use a serial life cycle for a multisite team. It’s too hard to obtain feedback early about the project, and the early milestones are too easy to game. Serial life cycles for multisite projects encourage schedule games such as the one discussed in Schedule Chicken.

I’ve been ...

Get Manage It! now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.