I stumbled across a link to Glen Alleman‘s blog from a post on the Agile Project Management list today. He has an excellent post describing the FBI’s virtual case file project, it’s spectacular failure, and rebuttals to a lot of posts over the past few days to several agile lists asking if agile processes could have saved it.
In particular, several key things stood out to me about the project:
- The Project Manager had never led a project before. (He was brought in because of his FoxPro experience)
- There were no formal deadlines or milestones the contractors were obliged to meet
- The two contracting companies used polar opposite development methodologies
A very good read, and a blog I will definately be subscribing to.