Living On the Edge... of Project Management.

The best insight I got on PM came from an industry professional.

He said “I can trust every team in the company to build a good solution. I can trust them to build it in a reasonable time. The real issue is bringing 6 perfect solutions from 6 different teams together and getting them all to work. You’re dealing with fog of war as a project gets closer and closer to completion. That fog of war is centered around the edges of your project.

A lot of basic stuff is known. For example this website runs in a flavor of Go that allows me to update it in two clicks. User authentication can often be a two to three line integration of an API. Building certain internal tools can involve throwing together a framework and a few coding best practices, as well as fixing for known bugs around certain issues. Before you’ve even started, if you’re good at your job, a large amount of issues around standard problem solving can be predicted. But the issue is that you are still solving for something new, even just slightly new.

As your team gets larger and larger, the individual pieces you build may not fit together perfectly. So you have to work together as multiple teams to integrate your projects, which means going back to your initial fixes and changing them in nonstandard ways. Now you’ve all updated your projects, so you have to go test again. As your project scales up and up, not only the type of problems your solving for, but the volume you’re solving for can change. And suddenly this combination of things, an unexpected volume, an unexpected combination of standard solutions, a non standard combination of building blocks, can all combine together to create new issues that you haven’t encountered before, or even worse you haven’t figured out a way to see as a solvable problem and therefore aren’t even thinking about it.