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A project is successful if its costs are justified by its benefits. Establishing a track record of
successful projects is the most effective way for a project manager to reverse dangerous
attitudes in senior management.
Show Senior Managers the Impact of Their Decisions

The first step in working with senior managers is to know what a best-case scenario looks
like. In good organizations, decisions are based on objective standards and metrics that were
developed in advance to determine the health of the application. The goals of the project are
decided from the outset, and a successful project will have met those goals. Project deci-
sions—approval of schedules, deadlines, budgets, and resources—are made by a single per-
son or a group of people who make those decisions based on objective evidence.
Unfortunately, in small- to mid-sized companies, this is not usually the case. Decisions are
frequently made based on gut feelings instead of objective analysis. The people in charge
of project decisions are not necessarily experienced in working with software projects—in
many cases, this may be the first time they have encountered software projects. Even in
software companies, a small or young company may be run by a manager or management
team with industry, business, or organizational experience—but without much experience
managing software projects. While gut decisions can be successful, they will often lead to
serious project problems.
It’s true that project decisions based on gut instincts are often correct. If that were not the
case, people would never get into the habit of making gut decisions in the first place. But the
fact is, most small businesses are run entirely on gut instincts. And if you have a small prod-
uct with a small and well-understood user base, those gut decisions make intuitive sense to
anyone who understands both the product and the clients. That usually includes the upper
management of such a company. As a result, many small businesses have successfully built
and sold software products using mostly gut instincts to govern their decisions.
One typical example of project management by gut instinct is release readiness. The typi-
cal reasoning sounds like this: “We’ve tested the product longer than we did for the last
release, and we have not encountered any major problems. So let’s release it!” In contrast,
a release readiness process that was based on objective facts would require that a certain

percentage of the code base is covered by the tests, and that the number of defects that are
discovered falls below a certain threshold (based on the size of the application). For exam-
ple, the product might only be considered releasable if at least 70% of the code has been
executed under test, if no critical defects are found, and if there are fewer than 3 medium-
priority and 10 low-priority defects per 10,000 lines of code. Keep in mind that the exact
same testing activities could be performed in both cases; it’s just that in the second case,
everyone has already agreed that if these objective and measurable criteria are not met,
more testing is needed.

In a small company, the senior managers are happy if they are making more money this
year than last year. Most of the time, they don’t try to figure out why that happened. They
know that what they are doing is working, and there’s no need to question it. This attitude
is very common, and you must recognize its relevance to your projects.

MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP 239