Failure Should Be An Option
OK, it's not an option when you're trying to get three guys back home in a spaceship, but in our industry, there are lots of times that it should be.
I like what this post says:
It needs to be OK to kill a project. This one always gets under my skin. I've been dinged on performance reviews a couple of times in my career for calling halts to doomed projects. There were always valid reasons to stop: conflicting requirements, poor team performance, no infrastructure to deploy to...I could go on. The fact remains that as a leader (architect or pm) there is unrealistic pressure to deliver even in the face of doom. I even had one project where both the customer and I wanted to kill the project, but my IT management didn't want the black eye. Thank you matrix management. I'll conjecture that if it became acceptable to cancel dud projects as early as possible, IT departments might even become profit centers in some companies. Honestly...$80,000 to build the corporate jet reservation system?
A-effin'-men. Just look at evolution: it's always a work-in-progress. Same thing with creativity - it's rare to have an idea and have it be the "right" one. It takes time to mold and shape it.
Too offen I see companies push a project too far, all in the name of some twisted version of "success". The projects that I've enjoyed are those that everyone knows the vision and can bring it to reality.