Taking Projects to the Extreme

Computerworld - When IT project manager Steve Hawrysh was brought in to a Midwestern fulfillment services company to fix a half-million-dollar project that was going nowhere, the first thing he noticed was that there was no real agreement on what the project was about. The goal seemed to be to port existing mainframe capabilities to a client/server environment, but no one seemed to know why. "Nobody had really challenged the business to say, 'Why are you doing this?' " recalls Hawrysh, an independent consultant in Plymouth, Minn.

Using extreme project management tools, he forced the business unit people to figure out what they really wanted and to realize that they didn't have the time or resources to do it. The project was canceled.

"That was a success," he says, "because I saved them $450,000."

"Most projects that fail, fail before they start," says Rob Thomsett, a senior consultant at Cutter Consortium in Arlington, Mass. Thomsett is a leading proponent of extreme project management and author of Radical Project Management (Prentice Hall PTR, 2002). Studies such as "The Chaos Chronicles" by The Standish Group International Inc. in West Yarmouth, Mass., show that IT projects fail because of lack of stakeholder involvement, incomplete requirements, lack of sponsor support or unrealistic expectations—in a phrase: lack of commitment from your business customers.

Extreme project management is a new approach that's relatively unknown in the U.S. It requires the project manager to leave the technology to the tech team and concentrate his energies on managing critical stakeholders. It grew out of the extreme programming movement of the mid-'90s, a radical version of rapid application development that emphasizes IT/business teamwork to provide enhanced customer satisfaction. (For more on extreme programming, go to www.extremeprogramming.org.)

"It's called 'extreme' because it goes against common practice and is suited to projects being done in chaotic environments under severe constraints," says Thomsett, who does most of his work in Australia for companies such as A.M.P. Ltd. and Westpac Banking Corp., both in Sydney. "It's like extreme sports in that you have to be really proficient to do it."

Thomsett has developed a set of tools that are paper-based exercises designed to get stakeholders engaged. Project managers who have used the tools swear by them. "This process makes sure you're adding value to the company," Hawrysh says. "It makes you think about why we're doing it."

"In a traditional project, if it's not going to be done on time, someone has to break the news to executives," says Christine Moore, vice president of delivery services at Caribou Lake Software LLC, a Minneapolis firm that does custom software development. "Here, there's no news to break. If you're extreme, everyone is in it daily."