Classic Mistakes

People

• Undermined motivation
• Weak personnel
• Uncontrolled problem employees
• Heroics
• Adding people to a project late
• Noisy, crowded offices
• Friction between developers and customers
• Unrealistic expectations
• Lack of effective project sponsorship
• Lack of stakeholder buy-in
• Lack of user input
• Politics placed over substance
• Wishful thinking

Process

• Overly optimistic schedules
• Insufficient risk management
• Contractor failure
• Insufficient planning
• Abandonment of planning under pressure
• Wasted time during fuzzy front end
• Shortchanged upstream activities
• Inadequate design
• Shortchanged quality assurance
• Insufficient management controls
• Premature or overly frequent convergence
• Omitting necessary tasks from estimates
• Planning to catch up later
• Code like hell programming

Product

• Requirements gold-plating
• Feature creep
• Developer gold-plating
• Push-me, pull-me negotiation
• Research-oriented development

Technology

• Silver-bullet syndrome
• Overestimated savings from new tools or methods
• Switching tools in the middle of a project
• Lack of automated suorce-code control