Project Scope and Success
In many projects, in order to provide a reasonable probability of success, it will be necessary to reduce the scope by as much as a factor of two. I’ve learned this the hard way. Every project starts with an ambitious list of features and an optimistic timeline. Reality intervenes quickly – resources are tighter than expected, technical problems emerge, and deadlines don’t move. Cutting scope feels like failure. It’s the difference between shipping something that works and shipping nothing at all.