Of Lemons, Limes and Late Projects: Program Management Skills
There is a fascinating story showing how science can regress. In the late 1700s, the British Navy discovered that juice from lemons would ward off the debilitating or even fatal effects of scurvy. The juice provided the vitamin C missing from the preserved food in the shipboard diet. On land, all sorts of fresh meats and vegetables contain the trace amounts of vitamin C needed to stay healthy, but the lack in preserved foods on long voyages was disastrous. The Navy instituted a daily juice ration which eliminated scurvy entirely.
With the switch to faster steamships, the shorter time at sea made the daily juice ration superfluous. Sailors got all the vitamin C they needed from their frequent stops at port. Yet, the daily juice ration continued, with no one recognizing it was not needed for these shorter trips.
The British called a variety of citrus fruits “limes” at the time, and at some point the Navy switched the juice source from Mediterranean lemons to a Caribbean ‘sour lime’ grown in a reliable British Colony. Unfortunately, it had much less vitamin C, and none that survived the preparation process. Now the daily juice ration was not only overkill, it was not providing any benefit at all. It was ineffective, but not harmful.
Until longer arctic expeditions brought the incidence of scurvy back. At the same time, the newly discovered bacterial explanation for disease was all the rage. Doctors assumed bacteria were the real cause of scurvy and dismissed the folk remedies of the ‘limeys” of the 18thand 19thcentury. Instead of re-examining the daily juice ration, the Navy searched for a bacteria related cure, and expeditions continued to fail.
It was not until the benefits of vitamin C were rediscovered in the 20thcentury, when the vitamin itself was finally isolated, that the benefit of properly prepared citrus juice was appreciated again as the simple but complete solution for scurvy. The full story is well told here.
I was reminded of the story when reviewing what was going wrong with a recent project. One of the problems was an issue management process that was out of control.
I wrote about what issue management looks like on a high performing team in a blog post here. A team can overcome tremendous obstacles when issue management on a project has the right governance, access, flexibility and completeness. Management enforces standards and cadence; the right team members are recording, updating and documenting closure; necessary adjustments to the process are made and well communicated to the team; and issues are driven to final closure.
Great tools are so ubiquitous now that a project can have the trappings of appropriate issue management and still not be effective. Like the daily ration of ‘sour lime’ juice, the tools may be covering up a fatal flaw.
On a recent project, the development team had chosen the software tool Jira to manage user stories and development tasks, and then expanded its use to cover issue management as well. I have used Jira with much larger teams and it has all the features to handle issue management robustly.
Here, however, the usage had several fatal flaws. Management did not track and report issue statistics: the signal we should have been getting from counts of open issues and closure rates was not available. Developers changed customer-reported priority based on how difficult an issue would be to fix: level of need was muddied with level of effort. Parallel issues were set up for developers: current status of an issue was difficult or impossible for the end user to track. Issues were closed without a description of the resolution: the end user had to investigate to see if the resolution solved their base problem.
Delivering systems on time and on budget is still a challenge across the software industry. The good news is that successful projects have demonstrated the tools and practices needed to achieve success. However, you still need the discernment to see when your lemonade has been replaced with sour lime juice, and you still need to employ effective program management practices alongside the right tools.