Comments on: Fund Projects Incrementally

By: Demian Entrekin

Demian Entrekin — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:24:46 +0000

Incremental funding works well in organizations where the leadership team knows how to think that way. It works less well in organizations where that management style is less genetic. In other words, incremental funding is akin to iterative devlopment.

If your team knows how to make it work, it works. If you don’t, it doesn’t. I’d say the other comments here back this up quite well…

By: Glen B. Alleman

Glen B. Alleman — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:31:37 +0000

Johanna,
Jack Welsch learned how to deal with people who lied on the ROI. They now longer worked at GE the day the ROI did not come true.
Don’t take the low road. Force those wanting to spend the firms money to provide financially sound arguments as to why. They hold them to it. And remove them if they don’t produce tangible results.
Jack (in a direct experience) asked for the names of the people to be let go when the document management system we were installing was operable at Aircraft Engines.
It can be done, but you have to start acting like a business person rather than an IT person.

By: abby, the hacker chick blog

abby, the hacker chick blog — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 03:32:58 +0000

Awesome - great post! We can get some really huge disconnects between how the development team operates (when using agile) and how that maps back to the organization. This sounds like a fantastic way to help align goals and get people thinking about things in the same type of way.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:40:16 +0000

While incremental funding might work for software projects on standard hardware, it kinda falls apart the moment you need custom hardware, because custom hardware ain’t cheap or timeboxable.

By: Peter Edstrom

Peter Edstrom — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:34:27 +0000

I seem to have the reverse problem - no project is funded until it’s very big. In a recent example, I asked for about $500 to try something, and am spending 30-40 hours of time to prove it is worth it. IE, they just “spent” $4000 dollars of time to justify a $500 bill. Likewise, I find that management doesn’t want to think about something that is < $20k or so and so the automatic answer is no. But if it is $100k or more, I can invest months of time into proving it is a good idea, and it will consequentially be very likely to happen.

So my question is, how do you convince management that a small project, with a small benefit is worth the small risk?