A lesson well-learned from the Game That Never Was.
I just read this great article on Wired about the legendary vaporware Duke Nukem Forever. The author is clear that much of his story is conjecture, however it makes a lot sense to me having seen the ways software and web projects can be managed.
From the story that unfolds in the article, there is one line that resonates with me: “Broussard … did not appear to have an endgame — an overall plan for what the finished product would look like, and thus a way to recognize when it was nearing completion.” To me, this is the core problem that plagues so many development projects at so many organizations.
It can be summarily called a Purpose, or possibly a Goal. If you have failed to properly assess what it is you are going to build then you are just going to build a big pile of mess. Very likely you are going to keep building this pile of mess until it consumes your life and you have entire careers devoted to constructing a ship that will never sail.
I have seen many web projects in particular that are chartered like so: “Build a website for Customer X.” Ok but what is the point of this website? What is Customer X’s goal online? Increase customers? By how much over what period? What exactly are those customers going to do when they get here? Build brand awareness? Is there a marketing plan for how to support this website? Provide information about the organization? What kind of information? Who is writing it and how often are they updating it? How will they update it?
The software industry figured all that out ages ago, which is why the successful companies apply basic life cycle concepts to their projects, and the best project managers fight off feature creep like Bruce Campbell fights off the undead.
In the web, most likely Customer X wants you to get working RIGHT NOW, and also probably wants to see what you’ve DONE RIGHT NOW. They don’t want to muck around doing several months of Inception and Discovery where you force them to actually think about things, assessing user needs, or any of that rigmarole. Unfortunately, I have yet to work on a web project that does not suffer from that same problem in some way.
Times seem to be changing, somewhat slowly, as more and more people that “get” the web move into place. There is still a long road ahead, however, and many organizations still struggle to properly define projects, whether internal or external.
And for the record, yes I loved Duke Nukem 3D, but I always thought that the swearing and the strippers and all that were stupid. I loved that game because it was so damned fun to see your friend try in vain to outrun your RPG missile before disappearing in an explosion of fire and seemingly endless mangled body parts.
I read that same article in Wired yesterday – the whole issue was great…I really liked the article about Ellison and the NC (as the predecessor of the cloud, etc).