Today's evaluation of one of our projects was a tough one. It seemed like nothing had gone right. The customer had signed the contract far too late, which meant that resource management had to switch to another (inexperienced) team, because the original team was already booked for other projects; the platform to be used turned out to be much older than anticipated; the customer singlehandedly decided on a live release date, and forgot to inform anybody else on the team about it; half of the requirements turned out never to have reached the proper team members, due to some stupidly bad communication; and beta testing was a nightmare because the customer hired a third-party service organization, and the development team was not allowed access to the beta testing environment.
Needless to say, the first release of the project was bad. Really bad.
Could we have prevented our problems?
Of course!
Do the agile methods have anything to say about such problems?
(In our case) nothing useful!
Can we solve these problems by adding more processes?
Absolutely not!
