The Art of Project Management

6.1. Ideas get out of control

One frustrating observation in these times is that there are plenty of good ideas bouncing around, they just don't seem to land anywhere. Perhaps the worst experience of my career—at this stage in a project—was during the making of Internet Explorer 4.0. (If you're not interested in another war story, feel free to skip ahead to the next section.)

I remember sitting in my office staring at my whiteboard. Another PM and I had made a diagram of the larger project team and all of the features we were working on. Each time we thought it was complete, we'd remember a new requirement that had been added or changed. When we finished, it took up the whole whiteboard. Suddenly, he was off to a meeting, and I was alone in my office with the evil diagram.

I had tons of work to do, but I sat and stared at it anyway. I couldn't imagine how it happened. The size of each problem we were trying to solve was so large and overlapped so much with the other problems that I couldn't keep it in my head at the same time. I loved my team and my work, but that didn't protect me from my growing sense of despair. I couldn't see how we could finish what we had started. Although it was a promising mess, with lots of smart things in it, it was a mess nonetheless. A friend on the team poked his head in my office, saw the expression on my face and the diagram I was looking at, and understood immediately. He said, "Hey, feel the love!", which became our sarcastic rallying cry for ...