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How to recognize a succesful long term project
Through Lucas’, I got to an interesting article called Who’s Behind This Mess? He applied his ideas to companies, but I claim that it can be applied to long term projects as well.
- The project must address a pain point, an existing or soon-to-be problem
- The project must be run lean
- The project must not require its users to change their behavior in any significant way
(I substituted “project” for “company” throughout.)
I think the last point is so-so. It is true that it is much easier to meet customer demand without asking people to change the way they work. And you have to be very careful about asking people to change because they will resist. However, I believe that if they have a compelling reason to do so, people will change the way they behave.
So, I’d rephrase this being saying that an easy long term project will have the above 3 properties. If you drop some of these properties, life will get tougher.