Do you know this meeting? The project manager puts a slide up on the wall. Progress: 80%. Three quarters of the budget has been spent, but everyone is relaxed. The user interface is in place, the database is running, the demos look good.
This is the most dangerous moment in your project.
In software development, the first 80 per cent is often routine graft. These are standard components that can be put together quickly. The real complexity lurks in the rest: the business logic, the strange exceptions in the legacy data system, the security architecture. In reality, these “remaining 20 per cent” eat up 80 per cent of the time.
When someone shows us linear progress bars, we know that somebody is fooling themselves. A project is not finished when the screens look nice. It is finished when the ugly, complicated processes in the background run without errors.
When we review or take over a project that is already under way, we don’t look at the colourful slides. We ask to be shown what actually works. Usually it turns out that the project is not at 80 per cent, but closer to 30. That hurts. But better now than when the money is completely gone.