1. Senior
Partners
Guild
Managing in the Yellow Zone
Getting the troubled project under control
(and keeping it there)
Philadelphia Software Process
Improvement Network
November 20, 2003
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

2. Senior
Partners
Guild
Topics
 What is a Yellow Zone project?
 What’s in a color
 Preventing the Yellowing of the Green
 When it goes Yellow anyway
 A Yellow Zone rescue infrastructure
 The Orange Zone: unsalvageable Yellow Zone
projects
 Questions
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

3. Senior
Partners
Guild
What is a Yellow Zone project?
 Green, Red, or Yellow?
– Green Zone – Projects that are on schedule and on
budget, with no significant risk factors
– Red Zone – Projects that are in serious trouble, with a high
likelihood they will fail
– Yellow Zone – Projects at risk, but potentially salvageable
 The line from Green to Red usually passes through
Yellow
 Up to 70% of all active projects are in the Yellow
Zone
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

4. Senior
Partners
Guild
What’s in a color?
 The Business Case is the reference point
– Green Zone Project will probably achieve the goals and
objectives of the business case
– A Yellow Zone Project may fail to achieve at least one goal
or objective in the business case
– A Red Zone Project will probably fail to achieve the goals
and objectives in the business case
 Green Zone projects can turn Yellow, and Yellow can
turn Red or back to Green
 Red is likely to stay Red until Dead
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

5. Senior
Partners
Guild
What defines a Green Zone project?
 All business requirements are traceable to the business
case, and the entire business case is covered in the
requirements
 All IT requirements are traceable to the business
requirements and all business requirements are covered
by the IT requirements
 Requirements baselined and under change control
 Clear lines of communication understood and followed
 Ownership is being accepted
 Milestones are being managed successfully
 Minimal impact from rework time and costs
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

6. Senior
Partners
Guild
top causes of yellowing…
 Bad idea in the first place
– Overambitious
– Ambiguous
– Dubious measurability
– Aim at the wrong business drivers
 Inadequate verification and validation of “upstream”
deliverables, e.g., business cases, requirements, and
specifications, can defeat even a GOOD idea
 Poor communication between users and developers
 Scope creep
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

7. Senior
Partners
Preventing the Yellowing of the Guild
Green
 Establish a sponsor-IT partnership at the beginning
 Focus on business user-IT communication from the
beginning
 Revalidate upstream deliverables against their
predecessors whenever there is a change
 Control scope creep relentlessly
– If it is not required by the business case, leave it out
– If no longer required by the business case, TAKE IT OUT
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

8. Senior
Partners
Guild
The kiss of death
 No audit trail showing that clear lines of
communication are understood and ownership is
being accepted
– Clear lines of communication enable information to flow
efficiently and effectively
– Ownership prevents confusion or denial over authority and
responsibility
– Both are essential to correcting problems in anything else
 If these are lacking, everything else will eventually
spin out of control
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

9. Senior
Partners
Guild
When it goes Yellow anyway
 Happens when prevention is applied too late
 Most frequent causes
– Inadequate requirements management
– Poor communications between business and development
 If caught early enough, may be correctable or
reversible
 BE PREPARED FOR MERCY KILLING
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

10. Senior
Partners
Guild
Early signs of Yellowing
 More and more meetings accomplish little
 Critical path action items start to remain open
 Unanticipated pressures on cost and schedule
drivers
– Degrading relationship between developers and users
– Churn among key team members
– Difficulty in decisions about core requirements
– Significant changes in probability and/or potential impact of
exposure factors
– Changes in “drivers of complexity”
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

11. Senior
Partners
Guild
why kill a Yellow Zone project?
 It all comes back to the business case
– How deep in the Yellow Zone?
– Is acceptable payback still possible?
– Is acceptable ROI still possible?
– Does the original business case still make sense?
 If the answers don’t make a good case to continue,
logic says to kill the project
 Still….
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

12. Senior
Partners
Guild
Doomed projects are hard to kill
 Every project develops its own interest groups
– Sponsors with a political stake
– Developers whose jobs may depend on the project
continuing
– Vendors with a sale to protect
– Champions with an emotional stake
 Cancelled projects can create organization problems
– Cancelled projects may have already burned a lot of money
– Cancelled projects may result in cancelled jobs
 Few projects have an Exit Champion
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

13. Senior
Partners
The importance of an Exit Guild
Champion
 The “Devil’s Advocate” for technology decisions
– Resists the political and emotional arguments to continue a
doomed project
– Provides Management with the information that enables
Decision-by-Fact
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

14. Senior
Partners
The Kill or Cure-and-Continue Guild
decision
 Start with high-level project review
– Evaluate project viability against known exposure factors
– Revalidate the business case against the current project state
– Give as much credence to the Exit Champion as to the Continue
Champions
– Decide whether to Kill or Cure-and-Continue
 If the decision is to Cure and Continue
– Reassign personnel wherever necessary
– Appoint a Team Catalyst
– Create the infrastructure to permanently correct the exposure
factors
– Add a recurring revalidation process to ensure continuing
alignment with the business case
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

15. Senior
Partners
Guild
The importance of a Team Catalyst
 “The problems of software are not so much
technological as sociological”
– Tim Lister and Tom DeMarco, “Peopleware”, 1979
 A Team Catalyst can help restore cooperative
working relationships and help ensure that they stay
cooperative
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

16. Senior
Partners
Guild
Initial anti-Yellowing actions
 Ensure effective meeting management
 Acknowledge and resolve relationship issues
 Take control of team churn
 Enforce timely resolution of critical path action items
 Resolve requirements issues through facilitation
 Strengthen contingency/continuity management
components of risk management process
 Establish a “rapid response” process to manage
impact of changes in “drivers of complexity”
 Use all of the above to create a Yellow Zone rescue
infrastructure
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

17. Senior
Partners
The Yellow Zone Management Guild
infrastructure
 Processes
 People
 Tools
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

18. Senior
Partners
Guild
Processes
 Business case revalidation
 Requirements triage
 Retrospective Verification and Validation of
deliverables
 Risk-Driven testing
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

19. Senior
Partners
Guild
Business case revalidation
 May prevent exercises in futility
 May find legitimate, previously unrecognized
justifications to continue
– Additional or extended financial benefits
– “Intangible” operational benefits
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

20. Senior
Partners
Guild
“intangible” benefits
 Often higher value than hard dollar benefits
 Can strengthen a marginal business case
 Can often be translated into tangible benefits
 Examples:
– Improved customer satisfaction
– Improved employee morale
– Increased user self-sufficiency
 Recommended reading:
– “Making Technology Investments Profitable: ROI Roadmap
to Better Business Cases ” by Jack M. Keen and Bonnie
Digrius (Wiley, 2003)
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

21. Senior
Partners
Typical Activities Guild
 Identification of Business Requirements
 Risk Assessment for Project and Product
 Risk-Driven Testing
– Decomposition of Critical-risk Requirements into testable
parts
– Creation of Test Scenarios
– Execution of Test Scenarios
– Defect Reporting and Tracking
– Status Reporting
 Intra-phase reviews and quality gates
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

22. Senior
Partners
Guild
Requirements Triage
 Re-evaluate every requirement that has not been
completed for
– Criticality to the first release
– “Implementability”
– Impact on other requirements
– Impact on cost and schedule
 Eliminate or defer any requirement that is not critical
to the business case in the first release
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

23. Senior
Partners
Retrospective Verification and Guild
Validation
Retrospective validation
Business IT
Business
Specification Code
Case Requiremen Requiremen
s
ts ts
Forward expectations and boundaries
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

24. Senior
Partners
Guild
Risk-driven Testing
 Includes
– Decomposition of Critical Requirements into testable parts
– Creation/Execution of Test Scenarios
– Defect Reporting, Tracking and Status Reporting
 Traces back to prioritized business requirements
 Seeks to limit business exposure
 Seeks “Big Bugs” first
 Focuses on impact to the business case more than
probability of occurrence
 Requires a high-efficiency method, e.g. table driven
scripts
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

25. Senior
Partners
Intra-phase reviews and quality Guild
gates
 Re-assess business drivers and adjust business case
 Re-prioritize business requirements
 Re-prioritize IT requirements
 Update test strategy to reflect reprioritized IT
requirements
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

26. Senior
Partners
Guild
Summing up
 Prevention pays
 Communication and partnership are essential
 Every project creates an interest group biased toward
continuing the project
 Revalidate the business case before adding to the
investment
 Recover only what is worth recovering
 It takes courage to kill a doomed project
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild

27. Senior
Partners
Guild
More information?
Robert Benjamin, Partner
609 448-1963 (P)
609 977-6214 (M)
609 371-1322 (F)
Inquiries@SeniorPartnersGuild.com
www.SeniorPartnersGuild.com
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©2003, Senior Partners Guild