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planned full deployment target date. Unfortunately, the project ended up
taking an additional six months to complete the work and fully deploy the
modernized system. Although the customer was pleased with the fully
deployed final product, differing views existed among management with
respect to how well the project had been managed.
8.4 DART Post-Mortem Project Assessment
Most DART team members believed that the frequent time-boxed deliveries
and direct interaction between developers and customer personnel were crit-
ical to the eventual full acceptance of the final system by the customer. Many
team members indicated a belief four months into the project that they might
actually hit the aggressive six-month target. This leads to a question in
assessing the effectiveness of the process employed:
How could the team members who were so close to the project have missed in
assessing the true project status by so much?
After the project, I gave this question considerable thought and concluded the
answer involved multiple factors related to two on-going project activities:
• How the team identified its priority work for each thirty-day increment
• How the team assessed the overall status and reported that status to
senior management
The remainder of this chapter focuses on the related factors, how those factors
influenced project decisions, and what could have been done differently to
achieve a more successful project outcome.
8.5 More Case Study Background
This was the first Agile project for Al who was one of the key programmers
on DART. Like other team members, Al had read about Agile methods and
was enthusiastic about the opportunity to try them. Mike, one of the DART
customers, had an office down the hall from Al. Al knew from what he had
read about Agile methods that collaboration with the customer was impor-
tant. However, Al wasn't prepared for the collaborative challenge he faced
on DART.
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