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Guest View: The HOPE Method

By Jon Quigley and Kim Pries

September 15, 2009 — (Page 1 of 3)
When you step onto an airplane, you hope it will not crash. You, as a passenger, have no control over what happens during the flight. Statistics indicate flying is relatively safe, which is due to vehicle mechanics, pilot training and competence, flight crew and tower teamwork, and substantial planning.

Purchasing a lottery ticket or a spin on a roulette wheel is all about luck and hope, with little possibility of influencing the outcome. Sure, it is possible to purchase more lottery tickets or to buy more spots on the wheel for another spin, but the outcome is only incrementally improved. Why, then, do we so often see the HOPE method used in software project management?

The use of HOPE often starts at the beginning of the project, with Hurriedly Overlooked Project Extent (HOPE). The project manager will not know exactly what is to be delivered or how to go about doing it. The project manager will spend little time asking questions of the customer, never qualifying what is to be delivered or what constitutes good quality for the deliverable item. At best, any discussion will be around the very highest of levels of abstraction. We hope we got the full scope. This will have an impact when we estimate the project.

After the project manager spends his modicum of time understanding the targets of the project, he will transfer this knowledge to the project team. The HOPE project manager takes the team that is handed to him instead of identifying the resources needed.

Expectation HOPE
Once the team is assembled, the HOPE practitioner will let the project team magically know the demands upon them via Halfhearted Orientation to Project Expectations (HOPE). Here we neglect to identify of the areas of responsibility for delivering the project. The PM will not spend time identifying what constitutes success or how the team member contributions will be measured—no need for a resource allocation matrix or some other way of defining team roles. If all are accountable, then none are accountable.

Related Search Term(s): professional development

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Comments

09/18/2009 09:23:20 AM EST

This is hilarious and unfortunately describes the PM environment during my last contract engagement. Very clever.

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Third-party tools showcased at Professional Developers Conference
ComponentOne has a new development kit for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, while Infragistics created a version of NetAdvantage for Silverlight. Also, Developer Express and Microsoft announced a joint code-quality effort for C# Read More...

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