On first consideration this is a bit tricky. Even after I have had months to reflect on certain projects – it’s hard to tell exactly what happened. It’s scarily similar to being in a traffic accident. You hear the horror stories about poor, unwitting companies who bring in consulting firms to build a simple website and then millions of dollars over-budget and overdue they still don’t have a completed product. You wonder how something like this can happen but it’s not as crazy as it sounds. The larger the project the more likely this doomsday scenario is to loom its head within your company. We want to avoid these sorts of projects like the plague. We want the Zorro, who-was-that-masked-man-anyway, style of client interaction. Get in. Fix the problem. Kiss the pretty girl (metaphorically). Get out.
So how do we get there? Especially when each project is a combination of failure and success. One can always point to bright spots in bad projects and one can always point to shoddy spots in good projects. How do we clearly define where we’re reaching Zorro-level web development? How do we really know where the wheels are about to fall off?
First we need to define our terms when we talk of failure and success. We need to leave behind all the vague feelings about a project and come up with a list of simple questions that will tell us if we kicked butt or got our tail spanked.
I believe that the following set of questions will reveal wether a project was successful or a failure.
