The Art of Project Management

14.5. Summary

• Mid-game and end-game correspond to the middle and end of the project.

• If on any day the project is not going well, it's your job to figure out what's wrong and resolve it. Repeat this throughout mid-game.

• Projects are complex non-linear systems and have significant inertia. If you wait to see acute problems before taking action, you will be too late and may make things worse.

• When your project is out of control, you are flying behind the plane, which is a bad place to be. Sanity checking is the easiest way to stay in front of the plane. There are both tactical and strategic sanity checks.

• Consider how to take action to correct a situation in the safest way possible. The larger the action, and the further along the project is, the more dangerous the actions are.

• The coding pipeline is how work items are managed during implementation. There are aggressive and conservative ways to manage the pipeline.

• Milestone-based planning and the coding pipeline provide opportunities to make safe course corrections for projects.

• Change control (DCRs) is how you throttle the rate of medium- and low-level change on a project.