Establish Accountability - Define the scope
How many people have too much time in their day? How many people have too few projects to tackle? How many have too many resources? I have been fortunate in my IT career to work in an environment where there will always be more challenges than I can conquer, and not enough hours in the day. This is why, as a leader, you need to define the scope of the project. How many people have been burned by scope creep, when one developer adds just one more feature, and suddenly additional testing, QA, etc. pushes a deadline or ship date? Scope must be defined as clear and unambiguous. It must be universally accepted, and no matter how much pressure you endure, any change of scope must be documented, and preferably pushed to a later phase. I mentioned previously a CFO who would staff IT to take on eighty percent of the projects, believing the other twenty percent where not worth doing. If you do not define the scope, almost every project eventually slides into that bottom twenty percent! You can never reach the end, because the scope creeps slightly more quickly than the work can get done. Meet with your customers and stakeholders early; make sure their understanding is held by their support cast; and do not start working on the project until the scope has been signed off. You would not build a house without laying the foundations, so why set yourself up for failure by not defining what success looks like when you get there.
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