The Art of Project Management

15.6. Summary

• Big deadlines are a series of small deadlines.

• Any milestone has three smaller deadlines: design complete (specs finished), feature complete (implementation finished), and milestone complete (quality assurance and refinement finished).

• Defining exit criteria at the beginning of milestones improves the team's ability to hit its dates.

• Hitting dates is like landing airplanes: you need a long, slow approach. And you want to be ready to take off again quickly, without having to do major repairs.

• You need elements of measurement to track the project. Common elements include: daily builds, bug management, and the activity chart.

• You need elements of control to project level adjustments. Common elements of control include: review meetings, triage, and war team.

• The end of end-game is a slow, mind-numbing process. The challenge is to narrow the scope of changes until a satisfactory release remains.

• Now is the time to start the postmortem process. Give yourself and your team the benefit of learning from what went well and what didn't.

• If fortune shines on you, and your project makes it out the door, be happy. Very, very happy. Many people, through no fault of their own, never get that far. Plan a grand night. Do ridiculously fun and extravagant things (including inviting this author to the party). Give yourself stories to tell for years to come.