(^18) 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know
You Aren’t Special
Jared Richardson
Morrisville, North Carolina, U.S.
REMEMBER WhAT yoUR MoM TolD yoU? “You’re special! You’re unique!”
Right, just like every other boy or girl who had a mom! Believing that loving
lie leads to common software project problems.
I coach many different teams. Without fail, the teams who believe they’re “spe-
cial” are always behind when judged by how well they meet their software
project metrics. Because they think they’re special, they have a strong inclina-
tion to reinvent everything. They think, “No other team could have possibly
developed usable software, or at least not as outstanding as what we create
among ourselves.” Instead of learning from the mistakes of other developer
teams, they insist on making their own mistakes. Over and over and over. At
company expense.
They spend so much time rewriting, debugging, and putting their own twist
on software and tools* that are already industry standard that they never fin-
ish customer projects. The ones they should sell to people for money. Those
mythical, magical products that would be as special as the team, if only it ever
got them written.
To hear this unique group of developers tell it, there are no existing build sys-
tems that can handle their “one of a kind” requirements. So, they must write a
new one for each new project. Instead of reusing an existing object-database
mapping tool, they write their own. Web application framework? We can do
that, they profess. Continuous integration? Check. Testing harnesses? Let’s
write those, too. The vainest and most disillusioned of them will even attempt
to write their own programming languages.
- Tools: Simple programs that software developers use to create, debug, test, analyze, track, or other-
wise support quality software development.