Over-excitement usually results in over-engineering

I have come across a lot of situations situation where the project is having technical challenges and the customer has requested our services to detect the under-performing areas. In the era of pure JAVA-J2EE projects, mostly, the problems used to be genuine technical problems either at the design level or at the implementation level. The root cause of these problems usually manifested at technical level.

As IT moved to projects using packaged products, especially BPM projects, my observation has been very different. Well. The problems are still there but the root cause of these problems has seemed to be shifting up level by level.

To begin with, most of the challenges were at technical level. They are now shifting to customer level as overwhelming product features are influencing customers to do more & more. This is diverting their attention away from the core business requirements, resulting in unplanned changes on an on-going basis, causing damage to the base solution design. There have also been incidents where the customers are impressed so much from the product that instead of fitting in their requirements within the product framework, the requirements are modified heavily to fit into the product framework, causing misalignment with business expectations. When the misalignment is detected, heavy customization efforts are put in to align it back with business expectation. This heavy customization usually results in over-engineered solution which would then become the root cause of the poor performance of the solution.

There are few simple ways to avoid these problems:

• Stay focused on product evaluation by keeping the core business requirements in mind
• Develop pilot projects to confirm that product meets the desired requirements
• Do not get biased by exciting features while you are deep into your project implementation
• If there is no way you can avoid any major changes to the project while it is under construction, question each and every change to ensure it is really needed.

When you do all of this for your projects, close your eyes, give yourself some credit for reducing the project failure rate of IT industry.