WATCH · Software Delivery_
The £150,000 Software Mistake Nobody Stopped
Saleem Beg · Founder, Teque
● 2:22 · Posted 1 month ago
KEY TAKEAWAYS_
- £80,000 was wasted because nobody defined what 'done' looked like at the end of stage one — there were no milestone gates, no independent sign-off, no mechanism to stop
- Without pre-agreed exit points, projects fund themselves all the way to a bad end before anyone discovers the problem began at the beginning
- Before any software build, define three things: what does the end of stage one look like, who signs it off, and what happens if it doesn't pass
TRANSCRIPT_
Someone brought me in to look at a software project that had gone wrong. I opened the code base and within about 20 minutes I could see what had gone wrong and more importantly when it had gone wrong. And it wasn't recently or halfway through the project. It had gone wrong right at the start before anyone knew there was a problem.
They had spent about 200,000 on the project thus far and the same thing built properly should have cost no more than 120k. And while the technical issues were real, they weren't the cause but only symptoms. The real cause was that nobody had ever defined what done looked like at the end of stage one.
There were no milestone gates, no pre-agreed point at which an independent eye signs off before the next tranche is released. There was no mechanism to stop if things felt misaligned. So naturally they didn't stop. They funded it all the way to the end before they discovered it was wrong from the beginning.
Interestingly the people who commissioned this weren't technologically naive either. They had a spec but updates weren't always forthcoming from the developers and when they did come they were surface level. And they just had no way to verify what really worked and what didn't and more importantly how good the code was.
So the lesson they learned from this experience was to define three things. Number one what does the end of stage one look like? Number two, who signs it off? And number three, what happens if it doesn't pass? The exit mechanism must be baked into project governance because that's the governance that changes the outcome.
“The real cause was that nobody had ever defined what done looked like at the end of stage one.”
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