On a day when the last part of HS2 dies not with a bang, but with a whimper, there is a question asked in IT project development circles which is:
“How does a project get to be a year late?”
And the answer is:
“One week, at a time.”
Not my epithet, but if you’re a non-technology founder commissioning someone to build your MVP, this is a problem that you can easily run into because software projects often suffer from being delivered very late not because of one small issue, but just because you keep slipping by small amounts each week.
From there, it’s death by a thousand cuts.
Like a lot of my content, this is another forewarned is forearmed thing – as you’re running the project, you need to keep more of an eye on the agency than you might assume, and whilst you’re doing that just keep a tally of how many of those small slippages are occurring. More often than not, a pattern of small slippages points to a project that going to end up being chronically late.