Was Your Project "Done Right"? How Do You Know?

We all like to think that we understand our users, and that we listen carefully when they explain what they need. Armed with that certainty, we go off to design an application that scratches every itch the users described. And we are annoyed when they announce that, to their own surprise, what the developer delivered wasn't what the users wanted after all.

That's not always because your understanding was imperfect, but because few of us humans know the difference between "What I want" and "What I need." Often this distinction doesn't occur to us until we've made a few bad choices, which is why divorce lawyers earn a pretty good living.

Proponents of Agile methodologies will nod along with the above and mutter, "Isn't that what I've been saying all along?" (About the need/want issue; I'm not sure about the lawyers.) But I've recently bumped into a non-computer example that drove the message home for me.

It's a case of the busman's holiday: One of the things I do for fun (or at least to serve the community) is edit the monthly newsletter for a local all-volunteer nonprofit organization. That gives me a certain degree of dispassionate observer status, because every month I see (and correct the grammar in) the club's board meeting minutes, as well as the newsletter's other articles. I follow the club's projects, including its recent plans to move into a new building under a local government sponsorship. (I'm intentionally coy about its identity, here, as I don't want to embarrass anyone publicly, and the example doesn't need specifics.)

The guy who volunteered as Project Manager is very much of the old waterfall school. For several months, he's been proudly demonstrating to the club members how Gantt charts work and what "critical path" means. But I realized that in the past six months, about the only thing that has been produced is pretty charts, meeting reports, and a couple of architectural layouts (the latter generated by another volunteer who clearly has a workable vision for how it might all come together). There are real physical things to be built and installed in the new building, but as far as I can tell, not a single one of them is started.

Meanwhile, the club president, whom I like a lot, has left it up to this Project Manager (I'll refer to him as "Stan") because the president (let's call him "Joseph") wants to see the new building project "done right." I admire Joseph's delegation intent, but I'm beginning to see just how Waterfall projects go south. (Never mind that the situation is exacerbated because this is an all-volunteer organization. I spent many years as a computer user group activist, and learned from raw experience just how much is different when "motivating people" does not involve financial remuneration.) The bottom line is that nobody in this project could recognize whether or not it's been "done right" until the very end (i.e.

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