Friday, January 20, 2017

Keeping a sense of Fidelity



Fidelity, faithfulness, and commitment often seem to be the tension between:
  • What the customer/sponsor/user want, and
  • What the project charter/scope calls for.

Why so? Why isn't it straightforward? The business case begets the project charter; the charter begets the project plan; and then the project team is off to do the deliverables. Simple, right?

Wrong!

It's never that simple -- though on paper that's the way it should be.

What is reality is a challenge between "fidelity to user expectation" and "fidelity to user specification".

Expectation v specification. How to manage this? First, it's should always be a decision and not just a consequence of wandering off track; and second:
  • If you have the latitude to shift "loyalty" from specification to expectation, you are in what the community generally calls an "agile" environment.
  • If the decision process takes into account expectation as well as specification, then both of these should be on the list of "inputs" to the decision. And,
  • Indeed, there may be two decisions, one for each criteria, with the customer as the referee: does the customer want to honor the spec, or shift to expectation? (Does the customer have the latitude to make this decision?)
Keep this thought close by: what is really at stake is a "best value" outcome: "the most useful and important scope that's affordable."


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