Get It Right the Last Time: Developing an Agile Attitude

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Get It Right the Last Time: Developing an Agile Attitude

by Doug DeCarlo

September 5, 2006


I was brought up in the project management school of thought that preached, “Get it right the first time!” On the surface, it made a lot of sense. That way I wouldn’t find myself at the end of a project and discover that I had to do all or most of it over again. By then, any mistake would be very costly to fix or to re-do.
 
“Get it right the first time” makes good sense when the requirements are well known, if not fixed, and when the means for getting the job done are clear cut and proven.
 
However, the “get-it-right-the-first-time” philosophy is counter productive under circumstances where the final deliverable can not be known in advance with certainty, and more so when the means to achieving the end result are nebulous. Here you face the double whammy of an extreme project: Both the what (we are supposed to do) and the how (to get it done) are uncertain.
 
Under conditions of uncertainty, a project’s trajectory looks more like the unpredictable path of a heat-seeking missile attempting to catch up with a moving target.



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